Melbourne, second day off with Wendy and Peter

What is that? Today I’m working again but differently :-) Peter’s job is Printer. But he uses a very old technique called Lithography which not much person use today. He is the only one who does that in Victoria and they might be 5 maximum in the whole Australia. Using that technique, you can print from a stone or from a metal plate. So, what I’m doing today is I’m graining a stone to get rid of the old drawing. Then someone, certainly an artist, will be able to draw on that stone again. I’m going to explain the process of gaining only because I did not see peter printing unfortunately.

So here the old draw we need to clean.

We use 4 different size of powder. I think it’s metallic powder. it works the same way as sandpaper, there is thick grain and very fine one. So we wet the stone first and spread some powder (size 80).

Then we use that tool to spread the powder and grain the stone. We apply a rotation with the hand move it following a grid pattern: horizontal then vertical.

In action :-) It’s quite physical at the beginning because the tool does not rotate how we want. We need to get use to the rotation. On the opposite side of the handle there is a weight which helps for the rotation.

After few rows and columns we clean with water again and can see the difference. The draw almost disappeared! But it’s not finished. We need to use 4 times the first 80 size powder, then 2 times the 120, 2 times the 180 and finally 2 times the 220. More the artist wants to add details to his drawing the smoother the stone has to be.

So we continue with a finer powder.

And after a while the drawing disappeared completely and the stone is ready for use. Actually I’ve got a bit more work on this one but the idea is here. I wish I could see the printing process. Lithography by stone can not print too much copies because to grease used for drawing  breaks up quickly. Maybe after 10 or 20 copies the drawing would become less precise.

I like days off like this! Then we went to see some artists with wendy and visit Brooklyn quickly. Two days is very short but I’m really happy to have seen Wendy and Peter again :-) Thanks for having me! I had a great time and ate so much grapes! See you :-)