From: Barbara Mason
Subject: Vitreography
Guess what I did today? Learned a new process, O K, I admit it, I am a
process junkie! At any rate this was cool. We grained a piece of 3/8
inch glass just like you would a litho stone, using 100 grit
carborundum, the 220. Then cleaned it with vinegar and water. Then dried
it and painted on it with gouche (sp?) and litho crayon and water based
crayons and stabillo pencils. Then we covered it with a mixture of dow
silicone mixed half and half with thinner. We used a throw away sponge
brush for this. Then buffed it up with kem wipes, using a light touch
and changing wipes about 3 times. We are letting it cure overnight and
will roll it up and print tomorrow. What a fun process, very direct and
almost no chemicles. How dangerous is silicone? At any rate we put the
silicone mixture on in a hooded area with an exhaust fan just in case.
This has lots of possibilities and needs no major equipment. You could
sandblast the glass first instead of graining it to get it to hold ink.
I will experiment with plexi to see if I can get it to work in the same
way, I am all for using plexi if I can get it to work and hold the ink.
Mark Mahaffey of Mahaffey Fine Arts in Portland (master printer and
teacher of the class) said he tried plexi and couldn't get it to hold
enough ink. I will report more later on this process.
Has anyone else done this? What were your results? We also transferred a
photocopy to the glass and rolled it up, it was too much fun.
Barbara
From: Paul Romaniuk
Subject: Re: Vitreography
Barbara,
The technique you described is very similar to a process known as
"waterless lithography". I took several workshops on that process here in
Victoria, BC from Frank Janzen, a Tamarind Master Printer.
In our case, we drew with water-based (gum arabic, watercolour
pencils/crayons, UHU glue sticks), solvent-based materials (future floor
wax, sharpie pens, etc) and photocopy toner "tusches" directly onto
alumininum plates. You can use traditional ball-grained plates, which have
certain advantages (for things like photocopy transfers, as you described).
However, to really keep expenses to a minimum, it is possible to use the
backs of commercial aluminum photoplates that printers have shot and then
discarded without using (get them free from your local friendly printer).
These plates must first be prepared so they will accept the silicone
treatment, simply by washing them with a sodium silicate solution (no need
to grind them). The advantage to these plates is that after you've done
your drawing, siliconed them, washed out the drawing materials and rolled
up and printed, you can "recycle" them by stripping off the silicone -
something that cannot be done easily with the ball-grained plates.
I agree that there is much less exposure to toxic chemicals. However, in
addition to using odorless paint thinner to thin down the silicone, it is
also necessary to wash out any "solvent based" drawing materials with
acetone prior to roll up.
Anyway, if you would like to know more, e-mail me. You can also find tons
of information on Nik Semenoff's web site (http://duke.usask.ca/~semenoff/).
Frank will be giving workshops on waterless lithography next summer. If you
would like to attend a workshop on this process, in beautiful Victoria,
British Columbia, e-mail me and I will pass the information along to Frank
for his mailing list.
Cheers
Paul