Relief Printmaking With ABS Engravers' Plastic
Relief Printmaking With ABS Engravers' Plastic Part I - What is it? This blog is about using ABS plastic as a relief printing plate material. It is worthy in its own right and is also a useful alternative to wood, such as boxwood, for carving. Along the way of learning to work with ABS, I encountered new tools and methods, and all that will eventually be covered here. I am grateful to Chris Pig of Black Pig Studio for the YouTube videos he posted about this material. We will use ABS to make relief printing plates, similar to linocut and printed much the same way. I will assume for now that you are familiar with the principles of relief printing and the design requirement of the images. Engravers' plastic is a thin sheet of ABS plastic, commonly coated on one side with one color and a core of another. For sign-making, the color coat is laser cut. For us, it will be an aid in cutting. One significant thing is that it is only 1/20 of an inch thick, which will come t...