Viscosity Demo

These are some images from a demo I gave on viscosity printing. Viscosity printing was pioneered by Stanley William Hayter at his school Atellier 17. Hayter wasn't the first person to come up with the idea of viscosity printing, but the experimentation in simultaneous color printing at Atellier 17 helped make viscosity printing, and color techniques easier to understand and accomplish.

The premise of viscosity printing is that a thicker ink will not stick easily to a thinner ink. The printing method requires at least three seperate levels of relief and at least two rollers of diffrent densities (soft, medium, and/or hard).

I start by putting the thinnest ink into the recesses of the plate. I do not use a roller at this point, I use a piece of mat board, dip it into the ink and wipe it accross the plate. In the picture I am wiping the excess ink off of the plate using a piece of tarletan.

Here I am adding some burnt plate oil to thin the ink a little more and some transparent base, which also thins the ink and cuts the opacity and intensity of the color, before I roll it onto the plate.

Here I am rolling up my second color with the hardest roller. I am rolling up four, four by six plates at once, because of how the plates were etched the stages of depth were inconsistant by themselves.

Another view of the plates being rolled up with second color.

Rolling up the third color of ink. This is the only soft roller I had at the time, and it obviously has a dead spot in the center.

I've Rolled up all three colors and ran the plate through the press. Here I'm just about to pull the paper back, to see how the print turned out.

Here both the plate and the print can be seen together.

This photo shows the last roller used with the colors picked up from rolling a thicker ink, which was on the roller, over a thinner ink, which was on the plate.

This is just one method of viscosity printing, there are many more ways to print intaglio plates using viscosity printing that produce varying effects in the final product.