New Prints – Co:lab sell out to the man

It was a heavy night of printing last night as we set about the second of our co:lab team tasks. The brief we set ourselves this time was to create, within the space of a week (give or take allowances for general real life shenanigans), an A4 advert suitable for two colour printing. Those were our only spec. The product, concept, ideal or whatever we set out to promote was entirely ours to choose.
The eagle-eyed among you will see from the accompanying images that we only finished one of the three prints. We'd set out to complete two with the third planned for this evening (together with the beginnings of co:lab 3). Problems plagued us however, succeeding in blowing the bulbs in both of our halogen lamps. The first one (jono's) flickered and died 11 minutes into the 17 minute exposure of our first screen. A quick spin out to Scalloway to pick up Andrew's lamp allowed us to bundle on those last six minutes and to our relief the screen washed out perfectly and was good to use.
The second screen was less fortunate as, during exposure, the second lamp suffered a similar fate to the first... this time after only four minutes! Having no third lamp to fall back on Beto and Andrew spun off on a fruitless search for bulbs and returned empty handed. Fortunately Papa Sandilands came to the rescue with both 300w and 200w bulbs and game was back in play. To no avail however as, come washout time, all the emulsion bled from the screen leaving no trace of a template to print with.
Left with just the one workable screen we set about making the most of the evening.
Philip Eight – A Fragrance for Men is Andrew's contribution to the Advertisement task. Although originally conceived as an initial yellow layer plastered over with a second black layer inspiration kicked in and Andrew decided to try out the florescent pink, caking it in a second coat of raw umber. The pink was magnificent and when shining through the raw umber the colours joined in a deep regal red.
As this was the only print we had to work on we decided to plough on and try a variant on the initial yellow idea... unwittingly treading on the same error we'd made first time around with the screw picture from co:lab 1b. Yellow, it appears, is a remarkably difficult colour to work with when overlapping colours. It seems to lack punch and struggles to hold definition. We printed 21 sheets with a base colour yellow and proceed to work through 4 alternatives (many of which delivered oddly hazy results) before getting excited about the blend of the yellow with the florescent pink which we had stumbled upon earlier in the process while fooling around.
It was a late finish but we got some great prints in the end and have tucked away a fine catalogue of colour theory which should prove useful in future.
We're planning to attack Jono's piece tonight so check back in with us soon for the further adventures of co:lab!

Addendum: Having seen the workings for these prints Philip Eight has ask Andrew to become his official biographer and over the coming months his life will be documented in pictures at philipeight.blogspot.com.