The 4th floor

A very late updating...

2009-06-14T22:21:00.004+01:00

I have been very late recently to post some news, but here is important news, the show for the master is coming up, slowly...

Here is the link for the show www.macd2009.com. The show is on from the 22 till the 26 of June.

2009-03-08T12:39:00.007Z

If you look attentively, you will see that the posters are all different, I did not post twice the same poster.

Permutation

2009-03-08T12:35:00.006Z

So here are the permutations...

About angles...

2009-02-10T01:09:00.005Z

I am posting some of the different permutation of the poster in CMYK, but before I'll just quote Mark Gatter, in his book "Getting it right in print, Digital pre-press for graphic designers, page 33-34, "Consider the way we see colours. Obviously enough, we see black as the darkest, yellow as the lightest and cyan and magenta fall somewhere in between. When any one of them is printed as a fine screen (around 150 lines per inch), the dots are so small we cannot see them even if we hold the sheet only 205-300 mm away from us. Yellow is even harder to distinguish. It is so invisible to us as a shape that we have not even noticed it causing a moiré pattern in every four-colour print we have ever seen. And yet that is exactly what it does. Yellow can slide in between any two of the other colours, only 15° away from both of them. It always causes a moiré, and we never, ever see it. But it is not the case with any of the other colours.
Printers take things even further. As well as there being a range of relative visibility in the colours themselves, there are more -and less- visible screen angles. Not surprisingly, the most visible orientations -the ones which we will see more easily than any of the others- are 0° and 90°. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Our world is filled with vertical and horizontal objects, and so we are especially used to noticing those particular angles.
The least-visible orientation is 45°, and this is where black, the most visible colour, is placed.
To recap, yellow, the least visible colour, goes in at 0° or (or90°), the most visible angle.
Black, the most visible colour, goes in at 45°, the least visible angle.
Magenta and cyan are placed 30° either side of black, one at 15° and the other at 75° -and it does not matter which of them goes where."
This explain why sometimes the black seems to "eat" the other colours in certain permutation, especially when it replaces the cyan or magenta or yellow stencil.
Image from the book of Mark Gatter, page 34

Permute' v.t. interchange.—permutation

2009-02-10T01:03:00.004Z

Some close-up.

2009-02-10T00:50:00.006Z

Thanks to Sofia who happened to be there when I was working, I have different steps of the printing process.

2009-02-10T00:02:00.003Z

The silkscreen studio finally reopened, I printed the last layer of the four-color posters I am working on. I'll post pictures later, for now I am posting the posters I printed in January. The idea was to conceive a picture made of gradients on photoshop, with all the spectrum of color, to decompose the picture in the four layers, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, to apply half-tones, and then to "play" with the four stencils in silkscreen. If you consider that there are four variants in four color process print (CMYK), if you permute the stencil, still printing with these four colors, you get 15 different posters [arrangement of a number of quantities in every possible order, according to Collins dictionary]. In order to avoid the moiré pattern, printer have achieve to create the perfect combination of angles in the halftones, so Cyan is printed with an angle of 105 degrees, Magenta 75, Yellow 90, and Black 45. So when you overlap them, you get a regular rosette. The picture was compose with very few black, but a lot of yellow, which means that when the black was printed on the yellow stencil the poster was very dark, and the yellow printed on the black stencil, disappearing in the poster, too pale.

Chocolate poster

2009-02-07T01:48:00.005Z

A complete view of the poster.

Chocolate poster

2009-02-07T01:33:00.003Z

I finally printed around twenty posters on tracing paper, one on dark paper, one on thick acetate and couple on cartridge paper. They all smelled wonderful, not anymore after a year, they smell like chocolate easter eggs that you find a year later, hidden in some unexplored part of the garden. You have to hold it very very carefully and not too long, otherwise the heat of the hands will melt it. I really like the idea of ephemera print, and I would have like to push further the idea of edible print and edible literature that you have to keep in your fridge.

It is interesting to see how they change with the time. The one printed on dark paper is particularly interesting because the chocolate has a very close color to the background, but a total different texture, it has a very warm and soft texture. The acetate is the closest one to edible in a way, cause it can be licked (if it was not mixed with so many different silkscreen chemicals...). But I did not totally succeeded the tempering of the chocolate, so it crystallized after a while. I will post some photos of the acetate poster soon.

Chocolate poster

2009-02-07T01:25:00.004Z

Printing with chocolate is as simple as printing with ink strangely. The chocolate has more or less the same texture as the ink once the paste is added. And if it dries on the mesh you just have to heat it again with the hair dryer, and print again and again. The most difficult is not to print, it is to preserve and store the printed posters... I printed them on the hottest day of the month, the sunniest as well, and if it was very nice to have a chocolate smelly studio, it was a total nightmare to make the chocolate drying.

Chocolate poster

2009-02-07T01:02:00.003Z

The idea of this poster came up during a crit, Paulus our tutor suggested that as I was working about the relation between food and type, I should actually print text with food. We laugh, and then the idea started to grow stronger. I was already printing a lot, and I thought that there was not much difference between ink and melted chocolate. It was during easter holidays, and everyone was going back home to their country, so I ask my friends to bring me one chocolate bar from their local supermarket. I ended up with chocolate from Greece, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, France, England and Spain. I then composed a A1 poster with the front and back of every chocolate bar, copied down all their different ingredient and percentage of cocoa. I melted some of the darkest chocolate to prepare the ink and just walked in the silk-screen studio, more or less sure that it would work.

Chocolate poster

2009-02-07T00:48:00.006Z

I had to learn how to melt properly the chocolate by using the tempering system, because chocolate is made of different ingredients such as cocoa, cocoa butter and sugar, you have to respect cooling steps so the cocoa butter will crystalize perfectly. If it is not done respecting the tempering method, then the cocoa crystal will turn white, making pattern on the surface. So i had to keep the chocolate at a precise temperature on a thermos, re-heating it with the hair dryer time to time.

2009-02-07T00:27:00.005Z

Unfortunately, the silk-screen studio was closed today, so I couldn't take any pictures, except from the outside... The quality is so poor, that I will not post them. However, I am now posting pictures of the work I was printing the past year. I was working about the chocolate communication and the relation between cooking and designing. I always considered that designing was like cooking, a little bit of this, a little more of that, approaching the perfect balance between the element of a layout after many try, as a chef would do with a recipe. Starting from this idea, I realized a silk-screen poster printed with melted chocolate instead of ink. Manipulating the unctuous chocolate, checking the right temperature, observing the thin layer cooling down on the paper, like an anxious pastry chef with his creation.

First post

2009-02-05T21:52:00.000Z

Thanks to Zhivko, this blog is finally working. I should be able by tomorrow to take pictures of the work I have been printing since September and before.