Hand printing is by nature an imperfect process.  Some of the prints come out perfect, others less so.  Since I have been out of practice and working in improvised facilities a lot of my prints have come out less than perfect.  I’ve been keeping these and experimenting with different ways of using them.  One of the first ideas I had was to hand color them with acrylic washes.  Here are a couple of the initial attempts:

Most of these prints were from the last print of that color.  The screen would start getting clogged and parts of the print weren’t coming through.  The blue and purple one has a smear on the right side near the middle.  I have a bunch more that have bigger issues and I’m not sure yet what I am going to do with them. I may cut them up and rearrange them.  Not sure yet.

The washes are all really light.  I found that the color came out smoother when I had less pigment in the wash.  The paper is thick enough were it can take some water without buckling too bad but a few of the bigger areas were problematic in this regard.  I was controlling saturation by laying down additional coats of color after the first had dried. I think this probably added to the buckling issue but it still wasn’t that bad.

I really like how the light washes look against the really bright printed line, especially the red and blue.  I will probably set a few “good” prints aside from a future run to hand color.  I think this could add another level of iteration by allowing to change the way color is used to construct the figure.  It could be interesting.  I have a few more things I want to try this week, I will post when I have pictures.