duotone prints

nuff misprints but interesting outcomes. The tonal qualities of the best prints are pretty strange but enjoyable.

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…