This is about the rather miraculous process of letterpress printing photographs. No really.
Being the massive losers we are, we decided the only photos that would do for this experiment were of our beloved cats, Basil and Saffy (they have their own blog here). First step is to convert the image to half-tone:
This basically means it's made up of a series of dots. The greater the spacing between the dots, the lighter the area will appear when printed, and in turn, the denser the dots, the darker the area will appear. Genius.
This is then printed to film:
Then we realise it needs to be a negative and print it to film again:
To create something from which we can print, we use this magical little device to create a photopolymer plate from the film. This is a UV process. Don't ask me how it works...
The basics are that the printing areas will harden, and then the non-printing areas of the plate need to be washed away using this hi-tech method:
And you're left with this (ta da!):
This was all done in rather a rush as we were running out of time, so in future we definitely need to go at it slower. We weren't particularly confident we'd get something printable this time, but we were pleasantly surprised. We got our black ink ready:
Here's the inked plate on the Arab:
And the resultant print:
Just ignore the rather unfortunate shape across Basil's face, it's most likely due to over-vigorous scrubbing of the plate during the cleaning stage. Ahem.
Here's another photopolymer plate (not made in a rush) where you can see some very handsome fishes:
So there you have it! We're incredibly excited about the potential of this technique, the possibilities are endless really. We're very much looking forward to experimenting once we have the time, and when our Arab is ready to play of course.
