After making my first trail embossing in the print workshop, I went away spent more time thinking about the texture of the emboss and how to make more of a feature of this in recreating my paper records.
I booked in again and made a large 12 inch simple pencil drawing of a record.
I then scanned the drawing in and cleaned up any marks I didn’t want on the final emboss.
I wasn’t happy with the level of detail I had drawn on the paper, also my lines were not minimal and clean I had intended for them to be. So I decided I would try and make a digital drawing instead using Photoshop and a drawing tablet.
Although complicated to make, I was much happier with the digital drawing. The software provided me with the precise nature of the line vectors I had craved to have in the final work.
I enjoyed the digital print so much that I hope to use it again as part of my final body of work
The print of the drawing is very clean and minimal perhaps owing to the design led process so far.
Owing to the detail in the drawing/print I had to spend a lot of time washing away the nylon from in between each fine line after the image had been transferred onto the polymer plate.
After drying and hardening the drawing onto the plate, it became obvious that the plate was damaged from too much exposure to water.
Once I had embossed with the plate, the nylon had started to peel away from the metal.
Despite the damage the first emboss it made using the wet paper technique is really stunning.
I enjoy the breaking down of the lines as a result of the washing, it shows more about the relationship between drawing and cleaning, erasing/taking away as part of the language of drawing.