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Name: Nicolle Bertozzi
Date and Time:
Location: The Lab
Subject: Making Counterproofs Attempt 1
I had interpreted the recipe to mean the following:
Step 1: Take a print (although the recipe specifies an engraved print, I do not think it matters whether the plate used to print the piece was engraved or etched) and rub soap water onto it with a natural sea sponge (which the author-practitioner uses in other recipes in the manuscript even though it is not specified in this recipe)
Step 2: Take second piece of paper and place on top of the print
Step 3: Hold the second piece of paper in place and rub other the top with a burnisher
Step 4: Remove paper to reveal the counterproof printed onto second piece of paper as a mirror image of original print
Step 5: paint spike lavender oil onto counterproof to reveal the image on the other side of the paper in the same orientation as the original print
Step 6: trace this revealed image with brush or quill
Step 7: Hold oil-soaked paper over hot plate (with gloves and clips) and heat until the oil has disappeared
For my first day of reconstruction, I decided to attempt only steps 1 through 4 (i.e. making the initial counterproof). I decided to do this because I was unsure whether the counterproofing method would be successful enough to continue on with the remaining steps. I had hoped to do the reconstruction with historically-accurate lard and lye soap, but as it had not yet arrived, I decided to attempt the reconstruction with an unscented pure castile soap bar (made with vegetable oils). Based on a lecture given by Ad Stijnman on the way oil-based ink could be reactivated with soap because the soap binds to and saponifies the oils in the ink, I figured that the procedure would be similar enough to perhaps work with the castile soap. My workflow was as follows.
Materials:
Dr. Bronner’s Unscented Pure Castile Soap
Water
Natural sea sponge
Print (printed from etched plate with oil-based ink)
Scissors
Historical paper (I tried with both sized and unsized)
Burnisher
For my first attempt, I began by making soap water in a bowl by rubbing a bar of castile soap into water until the water turned opaque and soap bubbles began to form on the surface. Because the amount soapiness was not specified at all in the recipe, I started with this knowing that I could make the water soapier later if it seemed like that would work better.
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I soaked a sponge with this soap water and dabbed it onto the etched print that Tillmann had generously donated to my efforts. Because I was afraid that rubbing the paper with water would damage the paper, I tried first simply dabbing the print with the sponge until all of the print was damp.
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I then took a second sheet of historical paper (sized) and placed it on top of the print. I used my fingers to hold the two sheets in place and rubbed over the top of the second sheet with a burnisher. The amount of time one should spend rubbing was not specified, nor was the kind of pressure that should be used, so I put as much pressure onto the paper as I felt comfortable doing so as to not damage the paper and rubbed until I made sure that I had rubbed all parts of the print.
When I removed the second sheet of paper, a faint outline of the original image had been transferred onto the paper as a mirror image of the original print, but it was incredibly faint and likely not strong enough to be able to soak the paper in oil and trace the image on the other side. Still, it worked well as a general proof of concept, but it was hard to be sure if this counterproof had worked because of the soap or if trace amounts of ink on the surface of the print would have transferred anyway.
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Because the original print was still in very good condition and I wanted to see if I could get a better counterproof, I decided to try the technique again, this time physically rubbing the print with the soap water sponge to see if the rubbing had any affect on the amount of ink that would transfer. This produced no image transfer. For the third attempt, I made the water soapier and allowed suds of the soap to soak into the print for a few minutes. This third counterproof attempt produced a counterproof of just the leg of the lizard in the image.
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I tried again, this time soaking the print in soap water. Because the recipe didn’t specify how long the print should sit with the soap water and I hadn’t let the print sit with the soap for long at all, I decided to try leaving the print in a bath of soap water for a few minutes. I thought that maybe the soap needed time to bind to the oils in the ink.
After the print had soaked for a couple minutes, I placed another sheet of paper on top and rubbed them with a burnisher. The paper was much soggier this time around, and I could feel it wanting to tear as I rubbed it, but it never actually tore. This attempt produced no noticeable image transfer.
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I tried a few more times, each time altering my approach a bit.
Using a second print taken from the same plate, I tried soaking that it soap water for a few minutes
I tried flipping the two sheets of paper over and rubbing with the burnisher on the actual print as opposed to the second sheet of paper.
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None of these produced any kind of image transfer, so my first attempt was still the best counterproof.
Because even that wasn’t good enough to move on to the next step in the recipe, I decided that I would need to make a fresh print and take a counterproof from that while the ink was still wet.
Name: Nicolle Bertozzi
Date and Time:
Location: The Lab
Subject: Counterproof pulled from new print
Because my attempts to reactivate the ink on an already dried print had not produced a usable counterproof for the remaining steps of the author-practitioner’s recipe, I decided to make a new print and take a counterproof from that while the ink was still wet. Due to the unavailability of an actual printing press that could print an intaglio plate, I decided to do a relief print from a linocut block in the lab manually.
Materials:
Linocut block
Glass plate
Oil-based ink (ink for relief printing would have been ideal but all we had in the lab was ink for intaglio printing so I used that instead)
spatula
2 Ink roller (one for rolling out ink, one for rolling onto paper to make the print
Newsprint paper (for testing)
Unsized historical paper (two sheets)
Felt (ideally) or some other kind of buffer (I used a stack of newspaper)
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Step 1: roll out ink onto glass plate until the sound of the roller rolling across the inked glass plate sounds velvety (and not sticky) and the roller is well-inked
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Step 2: roll inked roller onto linocut block until the parts of the block that have not been cut away are covered in black ink.
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Step 3: place paper onto linocut block, place newspaper/felt on top of paper, and use the clean roller to roll over the top of the newspaper/felt in order to make the ink from the block print onto the paper. I did this a few times with newsprint paper to make sure that the printing was working the way I wanted to before printing onto the unsized historical paper.
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Step 4: Take the freshly printed sheet of paper and lay a second sheet of paper on top so that it comes in contact with the still-wet ink. Place newspaper/felt on top of that and roll with clean roller again so that the ink from the fresh print prints onto the second sheet of paper
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Overall, this improvised relief printing method worked well enough to give me an original print (the print take from the block that was a mirror image of the block) and a counterproof from that print (a mirror image of the original print that was therefore oriented the same way as the block)
Name: Nicolle Bertozzi
Date and Time:
Location: The Lab
Subject: Tracing the Counterproof
Having made a counterproof a couple days before with a makeshift relief print, I was able to follow through with the remaining steps of the a-p’s recipe. My workflow was as follows:
Materials:
Counterproof
newspaper
Spike lavender oil
Small container
Large Brush for oil
Ink (I used the 10:1 lampblack ink I made for this reconstruction)
Quill for ink
Small brush for ink
Hot plate
Safety Materials (see safety protocol for explanation of how I used these materials):
Heat gloves
Clips
Fume hood
Fire blanket
Bowl of sand
Step 1: (For this first step, I worked in the fume hood because spike lavender oil is very strong smelling.) Spread newspaper out in fume hood. Pour some spike lavender oil into the small container.
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Step 2: With large brush, brush spike lavender oil onto the counterproof until the paper becomes translucent and the printed image can be see from the other side of the paper.
Notes: I found that the brush and oil actually smeared some of the ink from the print. It wasn’t enough to affect my ability to continue, but for a future attempt I would probably soak the paper in a shallow pan of oil to prevent ink smearing.
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Step 3: Because tracing the image with a quill/brush required more dexterity and the spike lavender oil does not need to be handled in the fume hood, I moved to a table in the lab, which I covered with newspaper. I placed the oiled paper with the reverse side facing up and began to trace the image from the other side of the paper with a quill. I found pretty early on that the quill scratched the paper too much, so switched over to a brush for tracing the remainder of the image. I continued tracing as much of the image as I could see, but found that I had missed a lot of the small marks that had been printed on the original image from places on the lino block that hadn’t been cut away deeply enough.
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Step 4: Once the ink was dry, I moved back to the fume hood. I removed all the newspaper and instead set up a hot plate, making sure that a bowl of sand was close by in case the oil caught fire while I was heating it. I also made sure to have a fire blanket close by and ready. I wore heat resistant gloves and held the print with two clips about a foot above the hot plate, flipping the paper every once in a while. Sure enough, the oil evaporated fairly quickly, leaving the paper opaque again. The scent of spike lavender oil was still present.
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Because the unscented lye and lard soap arrived, I decided to try the soap water counterproof technique again to see if the kind of soap had any affect. I made a bowl of soap water with this soap. Then, I took one of the relief prints I had made on the newsprint paper as a test and rubbed it with a natural sponge soaked in this soap water. I placed another piece of paper on top and rubbed them with a burnisher. The image did appear to transfer a bit better than the earlier attempt with the etched print had, but was still not a fantastic image transfer.
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Some thoughts on the soap water counterproof:
I had thought that the technique depended mostly on the ink being oil-based, but because the prints were made with modern ink, it is possible that a more historically-accurate ink would produce better results
It is also possible that the amount of image transfer I did get from the soap water counterproof would have been enough, and that a skilled artist would be able to fill in the gaps in the image accurately even with the faint and disconnected lines my counterproofs did create
Rubbing the print appeared to be a more effective method than soaking the print in soap water
Name: (Also the name of your working partner)
Date and Time:
Location:
Subject:
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