DryPoints

My 3rd and 4th dry points were actually on a lighter weight paper, which is normally used for printing onto. I couldnt leave them to get wet for too long or they just fell apart so they wernt very damp, this made me think originally it wasnt going to work well but infact as you can see they worked extremely wel especially the orange. The black ink looks good against the vibrant orange background, i think the ink was i bit thick as it took a long while to dry and it's a very dark print but it worked wel. The white also worked wel but when i rubbed the ink into the etched area i didnt take all the excess off around the acetate and so it printed some spotty patches onto the page a little.

DryPoints

My first few dry points were a case of getting the amount of ink right and the dampness of the paper perfect. I used sugar paper because i know, through stage 1, that it worked wel. But both of these didnt work very wel the yellow paper was stil too damp and absorbed too much ink until it leaked into the page and the purple paper was too dry so the print didnt print very clear.

Experimenting with Dry Point...

I thought it was important to experiment with other print processes rather than assume they wouldnt work; a close technique, in my view, to lino printing is dry point. Here is my fully scratched and inked up dry point acetate ready for print. I thought about doing the reverse to how i did my lino (Positive/negative) and i scratched onto the acetate in a way that when printed the positive area of the crow would appear.

Tile Laser Cutting

I was very unsure how this was going to turn out, i spoke to a laser cutting technician who said i should set the material to glass and engrave and also change the height of the laser head. I did this and this is my result, i think its very discrete and in some ways beautiful but when the laser cutter engraves onto glass it engraves into the glazed layer, this tile didnt really have a glaze over it so the cutter was literally engraving into the tile surface which was maybe too hard for the laser machine. The design is enhanced a little by some dusty parts getting into the grooves but i think it definately helps brings the crow out more.

Fabric Laser Cutting

This green cut, onto cotton matt velvet fabric also has me sat on the fence. The laser cutter cut right through and the heat didnt fuse any of it together and so certain areas began to fall out. I think it worked quite effectively but after a few minutes of handling it the material began to fall apart even more. It has a "dark" feeling about it and the colour does too, but the falling out areas have gone too extreme and almost ruined it.
The brown material was an attempt to line up both a lino print and a laser cut to see how my idea was going to look. The laser cutter is difficult to line up, it begins a cut from the bottom left corner of the surface its cutting, which is why both techniques arn't in line, but i think it would be a better idea to laser cut first and line the lino print up by hand where i can control it more. I definately dont think this fabric; both material and the print colour, work wel for this design and the cut is too subtle to the point it's almost unnoticeable.

Fabric Laser Cutting

My first laser cut onto fabric was the pink material (cotton), i deleted some of the unwanted extra layers and set the cutter to cut through. The heat of the laser cutter and the kind of fabric formed almost like a hard outlined which fused together the cut out areas, so they remained connected to the material. It worked wel because of this happy accident, when held up to the light i could imagine the design as curtains very well.
My second cut was onto "Brushed Linen Cotton", although i set the laser cutter to cut through it didnt really cut, it was more of a slight engrave. The design came out very subtle, im unsure weather i like it or not because certain aspects of it are effective but it wasnt as i wanted it, but at the same time it was only an experiment and it had an unusual turn out.

LaserCutting

Iv now began to develope my design, using the laser cutter (2nd print process) this is my test cut onto cartridge paper some things i came across while cutting where;
+ I set the material to paper, it needed to be a light weight card setting in order to cut through
+ Some of the leaves contained more than a single layer so were cut again and again, some up to three layers. Because it's a hand drawn piece, i needed to delete some layers. It could have burnt the paper and it took alot longer
Apart from these few cons the cut was quite successful, i think the design is effective and clear, now to try other materials.