Characters from Theuerdank
September, 2006?
Collagraph, ?"x?"

The print shown above is what I turned in for a grade. If I'd had time to pull a few more black and white prints then I would have liked to get one that was a little bit lighter tone in the part with the lady and dog - The main problem there was simply not wiping quite enough in from the plate, so it printed a bit darker than the other two plates. Pictured below is another proof in which helped me to learn some of the problems that can arise from printing several plates onto one sheet of paper.

I found it very useful to write notes on state proofs and test prints. While working on a printing plate, and while inking/printing a plate, notes jotted down on earlier state proofs and test prints helped me to remember what went wrong or how I achieved certain results... and looking over them several years later I don't have to wonder quite so much about why something turned out the way that it did. So, the notes scrawled across the bottom of this print are a the best reminder I have of why the print looks the way that it does. As mentioned earlier, this print was done with three passes through the press - one for each of the three printing plates that make up the finished image. The first pass is on the right, the lady with the dog; the second pass was the section with the middle figure; with the number 2 written in the margin under that section; and the third section was on the left, with the number 3 under it. The problem with this print was that I did not let the ink on the print dry enough between each pass through the press. The first pass through went fine, though it seems that I did not leave quite enough ink on the plate when inking it... because I did not let the ink dry before running it through the press again, during the second pass wet ink on the print from the first pass was transferred to my newsprint backing paper - and this happened again with the first two sections when I ran the print through again for printing the third plate. With each pass the wet ink from previous passes was not only transferred from the paper I was printing on to the backing papers, but ink on those sections of the print was also squashed down and blurred.
When I realized what was happening with wet ink as described above, I decided to pull some ghost prints of the first two plates to help confirm that it was indeed an issue with ink transferring from the print to the backing newsprint rather than a problem with the plates themselves. A ghost print is a print that is pulled from a plate without re-inking the plate after it has already been printed one or more times. Because a ghost print uses residual ink left on the plate from a previous printing, the ghost print will have lighter tones overall than prints previously taken from the same plate without re-inking. That the overall tonal values and quality of print from both plates is pretty consistent between the two plates as printed here confirmed to me that the problems in my previous attempt were mostly from not letting the ink dry between each of three passes through the press.