Rolling On One

We stayed in Peach house at College of the Atlantic. We were in a dorm room set up as a triple on the second floor. The other side of the building was empty most of the time we were there, but a residence counselor turned up the last night or maybe even the last two nights, settling in a couple of days before the other students returned.

College of the Atlantic is on the grounds of what used to be a mansion. There are gardens left from the end of the 19th century, and a stone building called The Turrets that was the main house of the estate, built in 1895. The rest of the buildings are pretty new, and The Turrets itself needed extensive repairs when the college was founded in the late 1960s. Aw heck, you’ll check their web site if you want to know.

My last workshop at the Nature Printing Society conference was on foilography. It’s a printing method that uses a piece of aluminum foil pressed over some object as its plate. Our instructor and the inventor of the technique, Charles Morgan, has a long writeup of it as a PDF that you can download. The big advantage of it over direct nature printing is that the subject is protected under the foil, so the ink never touches it. That makes it possible to get prints from things that you don’t want to damage and multiple prints of things that wouldn’t stand up to repeated inking. Or subjects that you couldn’t ink, like dust bunnies.
Here’s Morgan (you can call him Herr Doktor Professor Morgan if you want; he has multiple advanced degrees) talking to us:

To make a foilography plate, you essentially put your subject on a piece of aluminum foil (foil shiny side up on a soft surface like a piece of felt, subject more texture side down on top of the foil — that is, for leaves, vein side of the leaf against the foil), put a piece of plexiglas (all corners and edges beveled and smoothed, no sharp corners) on top of that, wrap the foil around the bottom of the plexi and tape it down, and press the foil flat. If you have an etching press, that’s the best way to press it all flat. If you don’t, you can put the plexi-subject-foil sandwich down (subject on top side of the plexi), put a couple of pieces of felt over it, and run it over with a rolling pin and lots of pressure.

Here’s a foilography plate of a dragonfly, made in the etching press by Laurie, in the pink top in a previous post. This is her second attempt at this dragonfly; dragonfly innards messed up the first plate and were cleaned up in between. To me, the possibility of making multiple prints of a dragonfly (or other insect wings) is the biggest attraction of foilography. I got one print of a dragonfly wing two years ago, but it crumbled before I could ink a second time. With this process, you’re inking the foil, which is relatively substantial.

Does it print? Gorgeously.

This is only one of several prints from the plate. I don’t want to say it’s easy to get a foil plate inked evenly without getting ink on the background (which you can clean up with a Q-tip before printing), but it’s possible. Read that PDF, or take a workshop yourself, to learn several methods. For subjects as thin as a thin leaf, protecting the background with a mask cut from overhead transparency film works well. I tried a beech leaf first and got a good print on the first try. My next plate was two small feathers. The thin edges of the feathers were so thin that I couldn’t get the edge inked cleanly. The plate looked better than any of my prints. Maybe with more patience I could have done better.
Here are some other prints from the workshop drying. Yes, that’s a tiny frog in the bottom picture.

On Thursday I continued my major in fish printing with the class in Fish Printing in the Field by Ian Workman of Cudjoe Key, Florida.

Ian (shown below with Charlotte, another workshop participant) looks and talks a lot like someone you can easily picture hanging around the keys having a beer with Jimmy Buffet.

We didn’t go out in the field printing fish in this workshop, but Ian showed us some of the things he does to get good prints out on boats or at the end of a fishing tournament where the participants want a record of their catch before they take it back to cook, or when he has two minutes to demonstrate making a print during an interview on a Miami TV news program. The woman in the pink top, incidently, is Laurie from North Carolina. She got some gorgeous prints of a dragonfly in the foilography class on Friday, which I’ll show you in a future post.

Ian’s method is basically to wash up the fish and get it as dry as you can, ink the body and tail of the fish, have someone else help you hold the paper steady while you rub the paper down all over the fish’s body to print it, then have the assistant hold the paper steady with one hand and lift it up off the fins with the other while you ink the fin, then spread the fin out with the fingers of one hand while rubbing the paper down from above to print that fin with the other hand. This obviously takes a demonstration and takes a lot of practice to work well. Here’s Susan, one of the most enthusiastic and generally most fun people at the conference, practicing. That orange band on her T-shirt is a stripe of leaves printed with SoftScrub, which bleaches out the color where you print, giving a light print on dark fabric.

By the time I had had a lot of practice, late in the afternoon, the fish were getting fairly ripe. Although they were spending the nights in a cooler, they had been out of the cooler being printed for three full days. People wandering into the zoology lab, where the class was, tended not to stay long. We were thinking, old fish printers never die, they just smell that way.

I spent a lot of the morning trying to print a sculpin and not getting very good results. Then I did several prints of just the head and front fins of something that looked reminiscent of a haddock, with mixed results. Late in the day a flounder was available on the desk next to my space, and I got two prints of it that I was very pleased with.

One of the best parts of Ian’s presentation was a demonstration of how to cheat on prints, I mean embellish and correct prints, by adding stippling and drawing in some lines where things didn’t print as well as you wanted, for instance around fins. I worked on one of my sculpin prints and got it much much better than it had been originally.

After a brief nap after the whale watch, we went to Acadia National Park. Arlene noticed that I’m old enough to get a senior pass to all national parks for the rest of my life for $10! Wow! that’s half the regular one day admission charge for a car just for Acadia! There was one more admission checkpoint to go through, where I pulled out the card and said, “Woo hoo! I’m a geezer!”

Acadia is known for mountaintop views over the ocean and rocky shores. We didn’t get up the mountains, but we did see plenty of rocky shore, like this

and this

and this.

There was also a lovely lake, Bubble Pond, where we stopped and walked briefly. But after walking a mile to downtown Bar Harbor for the whale watch and a mile back, we didn’t feel the need for a lot more walking exercise.

Wednesday was a free day in the middle of the printing conference. The organizers had arranged whale watch reservations for those participants who wanted them, including of course us. So at eight o’clock we were walking into downtown Bar Harbor to the pier, carrying all the warm clothing we had with us.

Pulling out of the harbor we passed, of course, lots of lobster boats.

Oh! That’s a better picture than I realized. Want it for a calendar or screen saver?

The sea was calm but with a long swell. The boat would throw a big curtain of spray off the sides as it cut through the crest of each swell.

We headed out to sea for most of an hour with occasional sightings of porpoises and seals. Finslly we were in the general area where it was reasonable to expect to see whales, where the contour of the seabed and the currents combined to push nutrient-laden water up from the bottom to the surface where sunlight and the nutrients would let the plant plankton grow, the animal plankton eat it, and on up the food chain to the whales. The naturalist – guide – narrator exhorted us once more to keep an eye out all around because whales could be anywhere around us, and, thar she blows, I saw a spout at ten o’clock. There were several other spouts ahead. This isn’t a photo of that spout, but you get the idea:

When we got closer to where there were several spouts, we saw something like this:

That’s at least three finback whales, the second longest kind of whale, the second largest kind of animal ever to live on this planet. Here’s one closer up:

What happens is that the whales swim on the surface for a while, breathing (that is, spouting) several times each, and then dive for food. They can hold their breath for up to an hour if they need to, but more likely they will stay underwater for five to ten minutes and then come up , well, wherever they happen to come up. Everyone has to be on the alert again for a re-sighting. After we had watched the finbacks for a while two humpback whales showed up. The finbacks dive by sort of raising the center of their bodies and sinking down. The humpbacks have more blubber, so they’re more buoyant. They need an extra push with the tail to dive. They’re the ones that give you a more impressive view, a good fluke shot.

These two humpbacks were a female named Siphon and her calf of the year. The naturalists recognize the whales by the patterns on the tail, as individual as fingerprints.

Being out there on the ocean with whales all around you is much more impressive than the picture indicates. You have to be watching all around, or at least all there is on your side of the boat, all the time. Anything, even hundreds of yards away, stands out against the uniformity of the water, so it seems bigger there than it looks in my pictures.

On the way back we stopped to look at an island that has a large seal colony. There were a lot of seals hauled out on the rocky shore, looking like more rocks.

Got that? See the seals? They’re there. Here’s a detail of that picture.

My class on Tuesday was indirect fish printing with Mineo Yamamoto, an expert in Japanese fish printing. Mineo was at the Nature Printing Society conference that we went to two years ago. On Monday he had given a class here on printing a crab —

— that’s one of the results of that class.

Mineo is a central attraction of the NPS conferences. He’s a very extroverted character, not at all shy about promoting himself. His work is amazingly gorgeous.

Indirect printing means you’re not applying ink to the item you’re printing, but on the side of the paper or cloth away from the subject. It’s kind of like a gravestone rubbing.

Let’s see. First, we had to dig a well for the fish out of a sheet of pink styrofoam (the kind Home Depot sells for building insulation). We spread the the fins and tail out to the position we wanted them to print in and glued them down to the styrofoam. I had to support one fin on a couple of chunks of the styrofoam that I cut out of a corner of the block.

Next, we painted the top of the fish with a thin glue (I think it was methyl cellulose) and patted the sheet of polyester cloth that we were going to print on down on it, working from the highest part of the fish and smoothing it down carefully in all directions from there. I started printing too soon — that glue needed to be dried with a hair dryer before going on. The idea was to keep the cloth from shifting on the fish before the print was finished. Then we covered the fish’s eye with a circle of masking tape. The eye doesn’t get printed, but is painted on later.

Mineo set up a palette for each student’s fish. Mine was an orange rockfish. Mineo said that if he were printing that fish he would use about twelve colors, but that as a beginner I should work with six. He squeezed out and mixed up orange, pink, red, red-brown, silver, and white for me, and told me where they went: all over, all over, shoulder, shoulder, belly, belly.

The ink gets applied with tampos, dabbers made on a (round Japanese) toothpick with a cotton core and silk cover. You ink the tampo very lightly and test it on newsprint. If you get anything like a solid blob of color there’s too much ink, and you have to stamp it out until there’s just a slight cloud of color. You use a separate tampo, or maybe one large one and one small one, for each color of ink.

Mineo recommends stamping about forty dabs in each spot and moving slowly and steadily along the print. That’s a lot of repetitive motion for one print, and maybe more than I have patience for. I looked at what one experienced indirect printer was doing. She was getting much better definition of the scale texture than I was. She said it was because she was doing it the way Mineo says to, with lots and lots of dabs of a very dry tampo. There are layers and layers of color in each spot. You might think that only the last color of ink on a given spot matters, but because of the airbrush-like ink pattern that each dab gives, all the colors contribute to a very live surface.

After we all had been working on our prints for several hours, Mineo demonstrated how to do an eye. He uses all the same colors of ink that the fish is printed in, painting with a number 0 round brush. That means tiny, bristles a quarter of an inch long and brush a thirtysecond of an inch in diameter at the widest part. Like the fish body, the eye is done in layers of color, taking care to leave highlights blank and to shade other parts.

To sum up, here’s my finished print:

… and a closeup of its eye…

… and Mineo with two other participants and their prints:

Yesterday I took a workshop in beginning direct fish printing with Don Jenson, who prints fish out in Oregon.

This was direct printing, where you put the ink right on the fish, then put the paper on top of it and rub the back of the paper.

There was a limited selection of subjects at first:

More fish were on the way, in some luggage that had been lost by an airline! We were pretty sure the baggage people would be eager to get that particular bag off their hands and back to us as quickly as they could

Don started off by talking about how he prints fish. He’ll get a phone call from a charter boat that’s bringing in a big salmon, meet the boat at the dock, clean and scale the fish, make a print, and bring the fish back still fresh enough to sell to the cannery.

The first fish he tried to demonstrate printing was a skate. It took three tries to get enough ink to stick to it to get a good print. I took several pictures of the process. If you want, I’ll post them, but for now let’s cut to the chase:

Here’s another fish, a sculpin (which is very thick and boxy The sculpin sort of looked like ugly pink gourds in that picture of the fish selection. They’re just as ugly in person. Flatter fish are much easier to deal with). First, propped up and with fins supported so it could be printed:

Now, viewed from the inked side. We brushed water-based block printing ink onto our fish with a foam brush.

These prints are from that fish, done by a woman from England who had come over specifically to learn fish printing.

I’m writing from the Coacloud wireless network. I’m not used to taking a laptop away from home and using it on whatever network I find. We’re attending the Nature Printing Society workshop at College of the Atlantic (that’s the Coa in Coacloud) in Bar Harbor, Maine.

At the social hour after supper (a good salad bar, but the only choice for supper was meat sauce or vegetarian marinara sauce on spaghetti, and did I want any garlic bread? absolutely) someone was talking about having printed a roadkill squirrel. I’m not figuring on doing anything like that. I’m majoring in fish printing this week.

That’s me running from a bunch of angry yellow jackets.

That hadn’t happened to me in fifty years. When I was a kid my family spent our summer vacations on Lyme Rock Farm in Benson, Vermont. We spent a lot of our time fishing, swimming in Sunset Lake, and walking around the pasture. One day probably in 1957 or ’56 I was playing softball with Eddie Blais in the side yard, across the driveway from the house. He hit the ball over my head, over the berry patch, high into a tree behind me. Seconds later he was standing there laughing at me as I ran and jumped around, slapping my head like a crazy person for no reason he could see. Seconds later than that he was running and jumping around, slapping his head like a crazy person, as the wasps whose nest the ball had hit found him too.

This morning I was mowing the grass in the backyard in Newton. There were some yellow jackets flying around a leftover section of fence that’s in the middle of the yard, but I didn’t pay them any attention. Not, that is, until I bumped the mower into the fence, or mowed so close to it that I set it vibrating. There must be a nest under it, because the wasps turned nasty. I brushed a couple off my arms before I got smart enough to run away from the area. I’m sure I felt a couple of pinpricks that didn’t develop into full-fledged stings, but still three of them got me pretty well. Ouch ouch ouch!

Charley, Nicole, and Emma were in Casco this weekend. Nicole had emailed beforehand to ask what berries were ready for Emma to pick. There are a few remaining raspberries, but by now mostly it’s blackberries.

Arlene, Nicole, Emma, and I all went out picking. There were more blackberries than I expected. The bush I had scouted earlier was almost the best, but there was one with even more berries just along the side of the driveway. It’s a little disappointing when the best picking is the easiest to get to. At least, it makes you wonder why you bothered to work your way through the thickets to get one or two berries when there were dozens right in the open. But we had a good time and came back with almost a pint of berries.

With so many people in the house there was a lot of trash. Arlene and I went to the dump on Sunday afternoon. On the way home there was a deer in the middle of the road before we got back to downtown Casco. Off our association road there was one full-grown turkey and four smaller birds that looked like the young of the year, about three quarters the length of the older one. There must be a lot for turkeys to eat in these woods if they can grow to that size in four months!
On Sunday afternoon, after Arlene, Neil, Olga, and I had all rested up from the walk up Rattlesnake Mountain and Charley’s group had come back from playing miniature golf, we went over to the beach. I took the kayak, and brought along a child-size life jacket in case Emma wanted a ride. Nicole did let her come for a ride, just about fifty feet and back, just far enough that Emma could say she went for a ride in a kayak.