My first stone lithographs!
Me proudly holding up one of my lithograph prints.
This winter, I took a two-day lithograph workshop at Second State Press, a non-profit community printmaking studio in Philadelphia. The instructor was printmaker Chris Wallace. Wallace taught the traditional method using a stone, and it was so much fun, although I feel like I only brushed the surface. I would love to take more classes in the someday, and get more confident with this whole process.
Preparing the stone.
On the first day we had to prepare the surface of our stone.
Then we did some some sketches of images that we planned to turn into lithographs. In my sketchbook, I found this drawing of my niece playing the cello to use as inspiration:
A sketchbook drawing I used for inspriation: “Natalie with cello” pencil drawing, with poppy oil, extender, and burnt umber oil paint
I was also inspired by Pierre Bonnard’s beautiful lithographs. It was seeing a book of his prints that made me want to sign up for this class in the first place.
I drew on the stone with a special black crayon used especially for lithography.
I did another image on the same stone using another substance—I did not write down what it was called. But this was more like watercolor or ink, rather than a crayon. I just painted something from my imagination, a dryad behind a tree in the full moon.
Afterwards there were a lot of steps that seemed to involved cleaning the stone, and adding some acid to eat away at where the crayon or ink had been. Eventually, I got to “ink up” the stone and run it through the press.
Here’s a short video of me running my first lithograph print:
Pulling up the paper on my first print!
During the workshop, I made a total of six lithograph prints of both images, the girl playing the cello, and the dryad under the moon. I think the cello player turned out better. Each time I ran it through the press, it came out a little different. That’s because I tried different pressures of the press, different amounts of ink, and different papers.
The six cello player lithographs are for sale for $50 each, unframed.
“Dryad in the moonlight” lithograph, 6 × 4 iinches
