Freezer paper lithography

Freezer paper lithography

This post is about a journey of discovery – I think I may have stumbled on something good!

Read on for this exciting new addition to the technique of lithography – hot off the press.

Paper lithography or gum arabic transfer

Paper lithography is a process that is generally used to transfer images from a photocopy or drawing onto a printing plate e.g. for lino printing, etching or stone lithography. It is also known as ‘gum arabic transfer’.

It is the cheapest and most accessible form of lithography, and a good place to start if you are interested in discovering more about lithography prints.

Needless to say, curious printmakers have taken the concept of paper litho and played around with it as an art form in itself rather than just a transfer process. For more information on this a good place to start is Sue Browns book on Paper Lithography

There is a lot of good info on line about how to do paper lithography, so I am not going to go into huge detail about how to do it, as I want to share my new discovery asap. However, for the sake of completeness I’ll give you an overview of what it is and share some of my own paper lithography experiments to help understand how it works. 

What is lithography?

Lithography is a ‘planographic’ process, this means that the prints are taken from a flat surface. This surface was traditionally stone, but now we use a number of different materials, e.g. paper, zinc, polyester, wood, and roughened lino as well as stone.

The technique is based on the principle that oil and water don’t mix, and that a greasy surface attracts oily ink, while a wet surface repels oily ink.

Why do paper lithography?

• The process can be tricky, and needs a bit of persistence to master it, and it is quite difficult to get your head round how it actually works.
  
• It is a great way to incorporate photographic images into your hand made prints. Photos are transformed into more ethereal and atmospheric images and this works well with other hand printmaking techniques.
  
• Prints can closely resemble drawings – soft crayon lines or sharp pencil marks all reproduce clearly. 
  
• The equipment needed is very accessible; no need for expensive coated plates, UV lightboxes or acids etc.
  
• Once you get going it can be quite fast to produce a number of prints.

Paper lithography technique explained

Laser prints

Start with a high contrast b/w laser printed image. This can be a photo or a drawing.

(Use photoshop or similar to convert your image to black and white, remove the greyscale by increasing the contrast, and reverse the image if needed by flipping the vertical)

For the experiments here I used standard photocopy paper, 90gsm.

Nb. Always use a laser printer. Laser/photocopier toner is oil based. Don’t bother trying this with inkjet prints as that is water based.

Gum Arabic

Gum Arabic is a resin produced by acacia trees. It is used for lots of things from food to fireworks, including shoe polish and ceramics.

The key property that we are interested in here is its ability to attract water, as it makes paper more receptive to water, thereby helping the oil/water resist process to work better.

Buy it as crystals or powder a bit like sugar, and dilute with water, or get it ready mixed from art shops.

Ink the paper lithography plate

Take a print from the paper lithography plate

Lift the acetate with the inked-up paper plate attached and put it on the press (if you have one)

Cover it with a piece of dampened printing paper and run through the press.

Alternatively lay printing paper onto the inked plate, cover the back with greaseproof paper and rub with a baren or spoon to transfer the inked image onto the printing paper.

So what’s the problem with paper lithography?

Wet paper is fragile and the paper structure breaks down fairly quickly, which can be frustrating. Areas of denser ink soon lifts off the paper and tears it. The image above shows the paper litho plate after printing, still attached to the acetate sheet. Notice that the paper has bubbled up and torn in the middle. The next picture shows the print in sepia with the middle ripped out.

You can get one print, possibly two from each laser copy. I don’t like this. It seems wasteful and to have a plate that you can only get one print off seems more like a transfer and less like a print.

“How to make the paper stronger?” 

After producing a single torn print and spoiling the plate this was my urgent question.

The basic principle is to have a surface which absorbs water, but is also strong enough to roll printing ink on to. A single sheet of computer paper does the first bit but is not so great at the second.

A Brainwave moment!

I was scratching my head wondering how to get more prints from a paper lithography plate before it collapses and came up with a brainwave; freezer paper. 

My theory was that the plastic coating on one side of the freezer paper would strengthen it, and the plain paper surface would hold water and became damp without collapsing. 

I am very excited to tell you that this worked brilliantly!

Before I put a ‘naked’ piece of freezer paper into the laser printer I luckily remembered the sad story of a fellow printmaker (no names!) whose experiments with a laser printer led to gummed up rollers, mangled paper and a trip to the dump with the defunct printer.

WARNING

Laser printers reach 400 degrees.

Never put any exposed plastic in to the laser printer as it could melt and stick to the rollers ruining the printer. Always cover it with paper.

Follow this link for a good explanation and a film of how laser printers work. 

I used the freezer paper lithography plate exactly as described for single sheet paper litho, and just to see what happened I decided to keep printing from the same plate until it collapsed.

I did nine prints one after the other, and then got bored….

I am sure it could have done more, especially if the image didn’t have heavy dark areas, as these tend to start to pull away from the surface of the paper.

I was really pleased with this result, and I have not found it mentioned anywhere, so this may be the first discovery of freezer paper lithography!

More testing of freezer paper lithography plates

To make it more interesting I did a colour separation using the printers colours cyan, magenta and yellow with black for the drawing. (CMYK) As these had a good amount of transparent ink added I hoped this would also produce green, orange and purple where they overlapped.

This involved four plates, one for each colour. I put the black and white drawing on the lightbox and used a clean sheet of computer paper for each colour. As I wanted a crayon effect, I used a graphite stick to ‘colour’ in the different areas of red yellow and blue.

Once the three drawings with coloured areas marked on were laser copied on to freezer paper lithography plates it was time to print. 

As all the paper plates were A4 size and the layers were traced from the ‘master’ plate with the black and white drawing on registration was simple. I lined the printing paper up with the same corner of each paper plate and this was accurate enough for me.

How did the freezer paper lithography plates survive?

They started to look a bit mucky but this didn’t really affect the prints, and was probably due to me needing a more expert inking and sponging technique.

Each plate stood up to the stress of inking and printing over half a dozen times easily, with no suggestion of the paper breaking down apart from shedding some small surface fibres. This did begin to reduce the toner layer on the plates so some areas started to become paler. However, it would be easy to make duplicate freezer lithography plates on the laser printer if this became a problem.

Freezer paper lithography is a success!