duotone printing

I’ve been working on some prints that use duotone colouring without any black. A few years ago I was trying to work out if it might be possible to set up a very niche high quality journal publication for bmx concentrating on writing and a more fine art photographic approch. I spent some time trying to work out a practical and interesting way to economically produce something. I thought about 1/2 colour litho and on-demand digital print. In the end the other person I was talking it through with thought that photographs had to be full colour and we left that alone, and in the end the project very really got started but I was left wondering about duotone printing. So recently I decided to experiment with duotones in the silkscreen studio to see if I could get something out of it. I used this photograph:

Another prompt for me to print from this photograph is that my general approach to photography has matured now to quite a specific thing; I try to use my camera to make soft humanist images, these images are about a more emotive response to a situation that dispassionate observation. There are trying to not be observation but more like a painting or something. Anyhow the softness and blur in many of them I felt might convert well to a ink process as opposed  to making C-Type prints.

I mocked up an idea in photoshop using the blending modes; however I knew that this would never represent the real action of the ink in the studio.

Using an orange and a dark yellow I tried to make a blend of colour that represented the feel of the photograph. It was going to be impossible to have a gamut as wide as a 4 colour process so I knew that the image would become stylized and I tried to embrace that.

I printed this image just over a week ago and I must photograph and consolidate [into words] my findings…