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 to matter but may also make you a better printer. My standard stock size is 9" x 12", white core with a green or yellow surface. It is available from Amazon, but I now get it much more cheaply from TEMU. 

Part II - Tools

It is a fairly hard plastic. Linocut tools will mostly not work with it. The main tools are gouges and such as used in engraving. Because it is hard, the tools may need sharpening from time to time, something linocut artists are not often called upon to do. In the U.S., just about the only maker represented is E.C. Lyons. They make fine tools that come sharpened, and they are very responsive and helpful. Like linocut tools, they should always include a stropping block, such as that made by Flexcut. Sharpening engraving tools is a whole other topic. There are many online resources. 

These are the sort of tools to use. The bent shaft is to make it easier to attack the surface at a low angle. unlike linocut where we carve into the plate, here, we will work at a lower angle and cut away the surface mostly. There are other tools than are shown here. 

But other tools can be of great use. Because ABS is so thin, there is a real limit to how deeply it can be cut. In linocut, that is not a problem, because it can be cut so deeply that it is relatively easy to keep down chatter, inadvertent inking of high spots in the background cut areas. In fact, it is tedious to try to carve ABS as deeply as even it might allow, which is not very deep anyway. So, I use a rotary tool with a flexible drive cable and steel rotary file bits to easily cut the background deeper. A small rechargeable light engraving tool with appropriate rotary file bits is also useful to clean up in small spaces where the higher power tool cannot fit or is too easy to lose control. 

I like to incise fine lines over the inner border of areas to be cut to white. It is easier to cut very fine lines without risking chipping the edge of the line. I use mostly what's known as a square burin whose tip is a square turned so the one corner is down to cut into the material. This gives me an edge to cut against without chipping and a stopping place when cutting into it from the middle. The initial fine line cut will not be apparent after engraving is complete as it becomes just part of the white cut area. However, other fine lines may be used when design elements pass through black areas and need to be demarcated to make sense. 

Cutting the interior of white areas is work mostly for flat gravers. This time a flat edge does the cutting, shaving off a thin curl of plastic. These come in several widths. There are also other blade shapes to cut very thin lines and lines of varying depth, according to how the tool is used. It is well worth the investment to sacrifice one sheet for learning to cut. 

There are some other tools that may be useful, depending upon your style. Multi-line tools make multiple parallel lines for use in shading and crosshatching. You can just barely print 65 lines per inch without filling in with ink. 45 lines per inch is much easier. 25 lines per inch is available. They are often described and marked with the lines per inch and the number of lines or the width. For instance a tool may be marked 45/5, meaning it will cut 5 lines at 45 lines per inch. It will be 1/8 inch wide. A wider 45 tool will cut more lines. 

A very useful shading tool is a halftone rake. These are tools with edges to drag to cut the surface. They come with two cutting edges of different lines per inch, such as 45/65 and 25/45. 

Part III - Preparing the Plate

Because ABS is harder than lino, Japanese vinyl or rubber carving plates, it will potentially take a finer line. Lino can take a very fine line, but it may require ink modification to print well. And of course, like lino, an ABS plate has the capacity to be printed many hundreds of times without degrading. They also take pencil and permanent marker well and will readily take a transfer of a laser printout on plain paper using PVA, school glue, Modge Podge or gel medium. Let's cover that first. 

ABS sheets come with a thin plastic scratch-protective coating that has to be peeled off. It need not be sanded to take a transfer. If you have an image ready, print it on a laser (not inkjet) printer in the exact size you wish to carve. Because I use 9x12 sheets, I print on 8-1/2x14 paper. Otherwise, you have to print in two parts and rejoin them to transfer. 

Working very quickly (because it dries rapidly) paint the surface completely with the transfer medium. Not too thin, or it will dry before you can apply the image. Apply the image face down. You should have anticipated this and printed it mirrored horizontally so that it will be transferred in reverse to the plate and so print the right way around. Squeegee all the air bubbles out. They are not fatal, but there will be no transfer where there is a bubble. 

Let it dry for at least five hours. Soak the paper under running water, and when it is saturated and softened, begin rolling and rubbing it off with your fingers. The laser toner and medium will remain on the plate. 

You can also draw your design on the plate or add to the laser transfer. Most permanent fine-line pens will dry slowly enough that you have time to fix mistakes with a common eraser. But when dry, they will not come off. I mostly use Sakura Pigma Fineliner pens to draw and to touch up the laser image. 

First, here's the first cartoon I did following my original painting that I wanted to interpret in relief. The theme is the "Wolf Woman," a Southwestern folklore figure, a woman who roams the wilderness collecting the bones of wolves that dies unnatural deaths. When she collects a full set, she goes to her cave and sings the wolf back to life. I carved this one and then didn't like the result. 

I revised the cartoon to this.

Aesthetically, it's like linocut or woodcut. One nice thing is that you can use strong lights to shine through the material, and if you shine from the front to the back, you get some idea of what it will look like. 

                                                      Part IV - Cutting the Plate and Printing

I transferred that image to ABS and began cutting, doing editing on the fly. This is the final state plate. 

I made the print on 12x18 Richeson printmaking paper, using Caligo Safe Wash ink, and printed it using a 14" cold laminating press. I own a good etching press, but I use the cold laminator for most all relief. I inked with a Speedball six-inch hard rubber brayer, using light pressure and choosing the angles as I rolled to make sure no end of the brayer ever rolled while hanging over a large white area. 

Some of those white areas are a little messy with stray ink. But I didn't worry about that right now, because later today I will receive my new ultrasonic knife, and I want to try it by cutting out the large white areas. That will allow me to just back the plate with newsprint while inking. Any ink that gets on that because of the thin plate will just be on the paper. I'll follow up with that experience. 

I've come to really like this material. I like that it can be machined in ways that don't work well with lino, vinyl or rubber, all of which tend to break and clump under rotary file bits. I like the more subtle effects from the rotary file that can't be done easily with linocut tools. 

I've tried another subject in ABS, and I'll put that experience up next.