When making my collithos I work on polyester lithography material. This has a special coating which holds water. When I happened to come across a polyester paper, I thought this might also be suitable for lithography. I did some experiments, but it didn’t work as well as the lithographic polyester. Despite wetting the paper before inking, it still picked up too much ink for my liking.
Usually when I’ve finished a round of inking and printing, I experiment with different ways of using up the ink which is left on my inking surface. This time I did some back drawing. Back drawing is done by laying a sheet of paper on top of an inked surface and then making marks with a (pointed) tool, like a pencil, or even your fingers. The paper should be very thin and light, or it will pick up too much ink.
This is a scribbled back drawing for which I used cartridge paper. Although not a very heavy paper, it still picks up far too much ink.
It occurred to me that I could try using the polyester paper, that I still had, for this purpose and this worked very well.
The area around the drawing doesn’t pick up a lot of ink and the waterdrops on the ‘paper’ result in some nice textural marks. I’ll definitely play with this technique and material a little more.
