Big Fag Press

Metal Plate Lithography

a ha! finally!

we were wondering, theorising and fantasising at the time when we would actually start to print images directly drawn onto the lithographic plate.

We knew of the process, the few and simple elements needed, and the potential, but never this far managed to do anything with it.

This is until Fiona MacDonald decided to print with us, using age-old techniques of metal plates lithography.

Researching on the methods Fiona discovered a number of intersting facts:

the last person at the College of Fine Arts (UNSW) to use the techinique was about 20 years ago

most of the information is old and in analogue format

plates/chemicals and drawing implements are still current, but seldom used for any purpose.

Of course we at the BFP would be happy to resurrect such old craft, we LOVE old craft!

Above is a set of images that explain the process so far, and here is the set of instructions we have been using.

The test plate printed well, so Fiona is going to design the artwork now, as part of a mapping project BFP is pulling off with the help of a number of Woolloomooloo residents.

Green Bans Art Walk (GBAW) will be a month-long exhibition at both FirstDraft Depot Project Space (the studio complex / gallery were the Big FAG lives) and at the Cross Art Projects gallery in Kings Cross.

Soon enough a proper presentation of GBAW will come up on this blog and elsewhere, as at the moment we play with tusche!

touche’

Agatha’s FirstDraft Fundraiser

Late in 2010, Big Fag Press developed a print in collaboration with artist Agatha Gothe-Snape.

The print is a limited edition fundraiser with the proceeds to go to First Draft gallery. You can buy one from the First Draft website.

About the print:

This dazzling image of cascading text represents both the physical and emotional environment of a contemporary artist, reflecting on making work in Sydney, in a global and historical context, in the present day. Gothe Snape’s text work is both serious and playful representing a studious engagement with the actual time and space in which she works, whilst allowing her mind to wander across the whimsical and banal aspects of daily practice.

Here’s a shot of Big Fag Diego printing with Agatha:

And here’s a nice shot of the finished product:

Big Fag Press is officially Awesome!

Thanks to the Sydney Chapter of the Awesome Foundation, the Big Fag Press has just been given $1000.00 to help with a project we’ve been wanting to do for ages: print a big map of Woolloomooloo.

The Awesome Foundation is an international micro-philanthropy movement – ten trustees of the foundation in each city put up a hundred dollars each, so that every month a grand can be offered for a project which is “awesome”.

There isn’t any other stipulation, and the application process is dead easy. You just have to prove that it’s awesome.

As a small experimental entrepreneurial artists group, we’re really excited to be affiliated with this amazing form of DIY, bureaucracy-free benevolence.

Our project, to print a map of Woolloomooloo, is motivated by the fact that we’ve moved into this neighbourhood which is rich in layers of social and political history. The best way to “put yourself on the map” is to actually print it!

The map will be designed and produced as a first step towards a larger project we’re working on, called the “Green Bans Art Walk”, which will launch in August.

We’ll put up more info about that project soon. In the meantime, thanks Awesome!

Our new dust-jacket!

Since last October, Louise Anderson has been working with Big Fag Lucas as an “intern”, helping out with print and design related tasks on whatever project happens to be on the go.

We’ve loved having Louise around. She helps us to organise ourselves a bit better, and she doesn’t hesitate to tell us we’re crazy when we explain our “normal” methods of doing things. Needless to say, we’ve improved our methods a bit thanks to her.

But one of the most satisfying things Louise has done for us is to design and sew the handsome navy blue dust jacket you see in the picture above. The press needs to be protected from dust, and even though it sits in its own sealed garage, leaves and dust inevitably make their way into the workshop, where they wreak havoc on our desire to “get it right” when printing. So a dust jacket like this is essential.

The jacket rolls up on the broomstick which slots through the end nearest to us in the photo: one person can roll it off at the start of a printing day, and pop it back on again afterwards. Note the crisp white overlocked seams. Louise is actually a refugee from fashion design school, and we’re proudly introducing her to the chaos of working within an art context. Sometimes, like in the fabrication of our new dust jacket, the two worlds collide, quite nicely.

Printing up a Jason Wing Edition

This is Jason Wing, our latest happy customer. He came to us asking if we could work with him to create an edition of 100 prints to support the Gallery 4A fundraising scheme.

It’s a great scheme. Forgive me if I get it wrong, but it works something like this…

100 people are invited to subscribe to Gallery 4A’s programme. They each pay a thousand dollars. Then every month, they receive one artist-produced limited edition multiple. Over the course of a year, the subscribers have collected 12 gorgeous things, for rock-bottom prices, and the gallery has got itself a tidy sum to use in the running of their programmes!

As for the artists (and on this occasion, we the printers!), they get to have fun making a handsome piece of art in one hundred units.

Jason’s work presented some interesting challenges for us – his original design was an “RGB” jpg file (from a photo of a spraypainted stencil painting), and we needed to convert it to a 2 spot-colour offset print.

No matter how you slice it, the colours are never going to be exactly the same, so we pored over our PANTONE colour swatch, and Big Fag Pat’s computer, to craft up the precise colour separations in yellow and brown, which would look best within those constraints. The above is how it turned out. Printed on Fabriano archival paper, of course… Thanks to Gallery 4A for working with us, and thanks to Big Fag Diego for the printing yakka!

Making Books

One of our fans, Greg, sent through the link to this wonderful, mesmerising movie above. Actually, it probably pertains more to our friends at Blood and Thunder, who are into book-production (whereas the Big Fag is better at large size limited edition prints). But regardless, this is, as Greg says, some “serious print-porn”. (NB: this is very Safe For Work!)

[Incidentally, Greg is one of the founding trustees of the Sydney Chapter of the Awesome Foundation. Free chunks of thousand dollar cash for great ideas? WOW!]

Stop the Press: the Allure of Ink – by Caren Florance

The following is an article written by our Canberra colleague Caren Florance, aka Ampersand Duck. It was commissioned by Big Fag Press co-director Lucas Ihlein for his UNDERGROUND edition of Artlink Magazine, launched in June 2010. Since it relates directly to the seizing of obselete printing technology by ratbags, we thought it germane to reprint here on the Big Fag website.
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Stop the Press: the Allure of Ink
Caren Florence, June 2010

[An early printing office (!), 1499 (from S.H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (UK: Pelican, 1955), plate A.]

There is something magical that happens to text when it is printed. In print, a scramble of handwritten words becomes solid, legible and above all, authoritative. Some of the most outrageous propaganda and religious doctrine throughout world history have been believed because they have been printed. Printing brings ideas to the surface and imbues them with power in a way that cannot ever be underestimated. Even these days, with so many ideas shared over the internet, there is still glamour and prestige in having your words transformed into printed matter: witness all the blogs that turn into books.

Printing, however, takes money, and distribution needs connections. When people want or need to share their ideas without the necessary money and connections, you get underground publishing, and ingenious methods of print production and distribution.
Continue reading…

CMYK OMFG!

Here at Big Fag, we often fantasise about printing with loads of colours… But as our machine only prints one colour at a time, printing multicolour-style often involves lots of trickery and cunning-smarts in the preparation and execution thereof.

But as clever as we are, we’ve never been as cunning as this fellow, Xavier Antin, who completed a 4-colour CMYK print, using four separate printers in an incredible daisy chain of office-level technological heritage!

MAGENTA=Stencil duplicator
CYAN=Spirit duplicator
BLACK=Laser printer
YELLOW=Inkjet printer

The results are quite stunning:

Check it out over here… If you have time, follow the links, his other projects, hacking inkjet printers are pretty whacky too…

(…thanks to Marcus for the link…)

Paul Saint prints up a Big Card on the Big Fag

We recently had the pleasure of working with eminent Sydney artist Paul Saint to print the above piece. Paul was a real pleasure to work with – he spent time getting his head around the process in advance, even carrying out the colour separations himself.

The final works – a sort of grooved and rotary-ruined playing card – is now on show at Artspace gallery in Woolloomooloo, not far from where we at Big Fag have our workshop in the First Draft Depot.

You can see a set of photos from Paul’s show here – the prints are exhibited en masse, and integrated into a large scale installation consisting of glass, wax, old comic book pages, mirrors and bent rulers.

This was something of a “pro-bono” job for Big Fag. Earlier this year, Artspace sponsored Big Fags Mickie and Diego to attend the Basel Art Fair, where we’d been invited to have a booth. (Read about their experience here ). So we were happy to support Paul’s Artspace print with free labour as hearty thanks for helping us get to Switzerland…

Video – How Ink is Made

A great short film by the aptly-named Printing Ink Company on how their inks are made. It gives a great feel for how sticky and viscous the inks we use are, and a fair amount of insight into the complicated business of designing and making printable colour!

Watch it in fullscreen HD mode to see it really gloop.

(via Devour)