Printmakers love textures, and this post is all about creating textures on your collagraph plates by impressing found materials into tile cement.
This technique enables you to make very robust plates from delicate textured source material like leaves, lace, rope, net and more.
The best textured materials to impress in tile cement
The source materials need to be flat with a distinct textured surface, as you will be laying them onto the smooth cement and pressing them in.
Things with a broken surface work best as continuous flat areas can stick into the cement – so think of ferns rather than dock leaves, and lace or fabric with holes in rather than a piece of leather.
The trick
I spent a while trying to work out how to impress textures into tile cement. Most of the time I ended up in a right mess as its main characteristic is stickiness – as you would expect of something designed to stick tiles to the wall.
However, at some point in my experimenting I pressed something wet into it and, bingo – that is the answer!
If the items you are impressing are wet you will find they don’t stick into the cement, but leave an impression behind.
Impressing a feather
The best type of feathers to use for this are strong ones, like a tail or wing feather.
I usually run my fingers down it the wrong way to make the barbs clump together, rather have them all smooth.
Start by spreading a thin even layer of tile cement on your plate, then lay the wetted feather onto it and press down gently with a palette knife. You can add more cement to emphasise the edges of the feather, smoothed over with a palette knife. It doesn’t matter if cement goes on top of it as this will not show when you remove the feather.
As well as the feather impression the incidental marks made with the knife form part of the image.
Impressing fabric netting
This is a piece of holey T shirt material, (I bought the garment in a charity shop – a good source of interesting textures!) The fabric has been rung out in water and laid onto a thin layer of wet cement. You can see it being pressed down into the cement with the plastic spreader, and then lifted off. The cement squeezed up through all the holes.
Sanding the tile cement
This next example shows a plate made with piece of coarse lace (also a charity shop buy). It is important to remove the damp lace while the cement is still wet. Once it has dried the surface is very rough and this would not be suitable for printing.
The next stage is sanding the plate smooth. An electric sander can speed this up, but if you dont have one, coarse sand paper will be fine. it is probably best to do this outdoors as it can be quite dusty.
The purpose of sanding is to reduce and level the top of the texture. Sanding creates a smooth flat surface for the ink to sit on and helps to reveal the shape of the impression you have made.
It is important to reduce the depth of the finer lines, because if they are too deep they may not print properly.
The image below shows the lace plate after sanding.
Lighten the tone on the tile cement plate
Even though you have sanded the plate the overall ‘tooth’ of the cement is fairly rough and this will hold ink. This means the whole plate would print rather a dark tone. We need to smooth out the tooth so it will print lighter and this will help to make the impressed textures show more clearly. This works because the intaglio ink stays in the low areas of texture, while you are able to wipe the top (smoothed) surface clear of ink creating greater contrast between the high and low areas.
To lighten the tone I find the best material is diluted PVA glue, (also known as Elmers). Find this at your local diy store which will be cheaper than an art shop. Dilute the PVA till is is the consistency of pouring cream. If you use it neat it is too thick and will cover up the textures, so by diluting it you will lighten the surface of the cement without loosing any of the lovely textural details.
The PVA looks grey because I have mixed a bit of waterbased ink in to it so I can see where I have put it – if the glue is clear it can be hard to see where it is.
You can create subtle highlights by adding extra layers of PVA, or leave some areas without pva and they will print in a darker tone – have a look at this post for more info.
Seal the textured cement plate ready for printing
It is important to seal the surface of the plate where there is PVA. This is because the PVA can become sticky when it goes through the press with damp printing paper. The PVA glue re-wets and sticks to the printing paper, tearing the surface.
Shellac is ideal for sealing PVA. A thin coat of shellac (or knotting) shouldn’t alter any of the tones you have on your plate, but will securely seal the surface.
It is a good idea to run a new finished plate through the press with out any ink (blind embossing) this will test to see if there is any unsealed PVA on it as it will tear the paper. At this stage it is easy to touch up any areas with shellac before inking and printing the plate.
A fern frond
Ferns are great for printing from as they have such a strong structure. This one is a polypody, and the side with spores has been impressed into the plate. The plate was made using the crackle technique as described in this post.
Practice – it is worth it
When I have done this technique on courses many students have difficulty at first. It does need a bit of perseverance to get it working just right. It is a question of getting the hang of how thick to make the cement, and discovering suitable items to impress into it. The good thing about tile cement is that you can smooth it over and start again if you mess up, and there is plenty of room for experimentation…..
14 thoughts on “Impressed tile cement printing plates”
this sounds exciting – thanks Emily.
what are you using/what can be used for your plate to apply the cement to?
thanks
Jo
Tile cement will stick to anything so you can use it on card, wood, metal or acetate. I sometimes just use thin card, eg a cereal box for the cement, and then choose the best bits and cut or tear it out and glue onto a mount board plate.
Keen to have a go at this. Is mountboard or enviromount a suitable plate substrate for the tile cement?
Both are fine – see my reply to the question below – cement sticks to most things!
I wanted to let you know how much ai appreciate your curiosity in this medium and how inspiring your experiments are.
Thank you!
Kerry (Tasmania, Australia)
Ps..what size is your studio?
Thankyou Kerry – I do the blog to connect with other people so it is lovely to get comments like yours. The studio is about 6m x 6m – whatever the size it never seems big enough!
Thank you Emily, I’m excited to give this a go. I especially like your tips about sanding down and using coloured ink to see where the markings are as I’ve struggled with this recently.
Good to hear your studio is finished too!
Nice to hear from you Lynn – sometimes the simplest things make a big difference! I hope you are enjoying your printmaking, it sounds as if you are.
wouldn’t there be a problem of the cement crumbling under the pressure of the press? how can that be avoided?
The tile cement layer on the plate is only a couple of millimetres thick, and it is actually quite flexible and strong, also it is coated with pva – I have never had a problem with it begin damaged in the press. I think it has an acrylic base so it is not brittle and seems to be able to withstand high pressure with out crumbling, although it may eventually develop some cracks, but I quite like this effect.
thanks for your reply. l can see so many options opening up with this technique. wonderful!
Thank you for sharing your ideas. The tile cement works really well I have been using it for a background for printing Mangroves.
Hi, This is an amazing new idea for me- fantastic. I have a few questions…
1. What ink do you find best to print from these?
2. What printing press do you use?
3. Does the shellac preserve the plate/ matrix well for future use?Do you store these plates?
4 The York wall is beautiful, are there detailed notes of this process?
Very much appreciate the extent you share your processes.
Love from New Zealand
Hi Deborah, thanks for your questions;
1. I use hawthorn Printmaker inks, these are oil based, they do ship to NZ so you could try them if wanted.
2. I use an etching press, I. have a Rollick one, but for collagraphs the little die cutting machines also work fine.
3. Shellac does protect the surface of the plates and means you can lean the ink off. I dont always use it though.
4.The panel in York Library is made from cast plaster and painted with acrylics rather than printed on a press.
Hope this is helpful!