Greg Murdock

The past three weeks at New Leaf have been printing a three plate etching, à la poupée for artist Greg Murdock.
Below Lesley inks up the black plate


Here Mariya is inking up the second plate, a combo of orange and blue grey:




Multi-Plate Registration:

Sometimes it takes two!



Above Lesley marks registration



Ta-da! Its the Murdock wall

Copper Tree

This week at New Leaf we've been resurrecting an old project in need of sprucing up (no pun intended).
Back in 2004 New Leaf Editions began collaborating with Metz&Chew of Muse Atelier to create an architectural detail outside the Surrey Public Library in South Surrey/White Rock .
The project began from scratch, with Peter prepping the plates for Nancy Chew and Jacqueline Metz to work directly on with sugarlift.

Next Nancy and Jacqueline traced out where the sugar lift should be painted...
And the image area was painted with sugar lift, then prepped for etching
(this one is tricky to see but mylar has been fixed to the large areas of the plate not to be etched, and another area painted with hardground)
(This picture is after the image area has lifted away, and the pressure washer is removing the last bits)
This custom made tray held the ferric chloride and the plate during etching. The plates are so large the setup had to be moved outside. (Detail below)


Once the plates were etched and held ink, the plates were printed on Japanese Tissue (Masa) and attached piece by piece to ultimately create a huge 5 by 15 foot print


Which then needed to be framed...
However, seeing as no one in town could frame so large an image, New Leaf set to work creating a custom frame.
Including custom milled moulding




Which brings us up to present day!

Recently the plates have been pulled from the library walls to be cleaned. We are taking this time to paint the image area with a black enamel paint and patina the copper surface to a golden nut brown colour.

Here Mariya is carefully painting away

More to come on our progress...

BIMPE VII

Hello everyone,

BIMPE VII at long last is open for entry, we are accepting submissions online and the old fashioned way (paper entry form).

See all the details at www.BIMPE.com

Rawr

Artist Erik Olson visited the studio during his summer stay in Vancouver and made a juicy drypoint intaglio print while he was at it.

Here Erik scratches away on the face of a copper plate...


...to create the velvety print below, titled "White Tiger".

What have we been up to?

Many, many things. This spring has been bananas! and in the best way. Loads of printing to be done and extra hands to help out = a happy studio.

Ross Penhall
Reflected Corner

Ross Penhall just finished a print for Artist for Kids titled Reflected Corner: a four plate mezzotint/etching printed on black Somerset paper.
We've been printing non-stop for the unveiling of the print at the Artist for Kids Gallery in conjunction with Penhall's STUDIO - a show celebrating Ross's accomplishments over the last 25 years.










































































Above: A stopped out plate ready for etching, Chris and Lesley proofing (after printing 2 of 4 plates), Peter and Lesley proofing (after printing 3 of 4 plates).

BIMPE Buzz

BIMPE VI might be over but the buzz is still abound.........

We heard about a blurb in New Trail Magazine, a University of Alberta Alumni magazine, about the BIMPE show's third place prize winner Sergio Serrano.
Below is an excerpt from the magazine....

This piece called “Transmutation” by Sergio Serrano, ’09 BDes, was the third-place winner in the sixth annual Biennial International Miniature Print Exhibition. The approximately 900 entries came from all over the world with this year’s first-place winner from Bulgaria while second-place went to an American.

“I was pretty excited when I found out I’d won,” says Serrano, whose print is a variation of a piece from a larger work — an artist’s book inspired by The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges. “The 20 prints in the book are illustrations of obscure objects representing various imaginary beings with strong symbolic ties to alchemy,” he says. “The last illustration is the Ouroboros — traditionally, a serpent devouring its own tail, often used to represent the cyclical nature of the alchemists’ work.

“Transmutation is the transformation of one thing into another, in particular of common metals into gold or silver. The print of this same name shows the Ouroboros — illustrated as a strange, gear-like object — motionless and suspended in an ambiguous space. The words below it and the marker in between them suggest a state of transformation but do not hint at the specifics of the change.”

Congrats again Sergio!

To see the original article, click here

Cool enough to blog about

While we were in Toronto for Printopolis we spied some pretty cool posters for Ray-Ban the eyewear company

"Now, Ray-Ban is proud to introduce Rare Prints, a collection of colorful new patterns. To launch these new Rare Prints, we collaborated with some of the world's best print makers to design posters inspired by each of the different patterns. What resulted is a truly unique set of limited edition posters, signed and numbered by the artists."



Artwork was produced by Vahalla Studios in Kansas City