Meadowvale: Why Printmaking?
When I am spending hour upon hour, carving plates, inking plates and running them through the printing press — knowing I have 50–60 images to create using this method — I do find myself asking this question: why printmaking?
At the start of this project I didn’t really know which direction the game would be going in. My own methods as an artist are worlds away from how the majority of artwork is created in the board game industry which is dominated by digital tools like Procreate and Photoshop. You can create a set of images in one evening, and as they are digital you can make them will look slick, professional, and atmospheric, using layers, textures and digital brushes and pens. You also have the benefit of ‘undo’ should things not go to plan.
But for me, digitally created art can start to look generic. I am a fine artist, a composer, a writer, a designer, and I work through analogue processes. Yes, I use software for design, you can’t really publish anything without a basic industry standard set of assets. But my world revolves around handcrafted.
What this does, however, is slow the process down. What I get in return is artwork that could not have been created in any other way. Hand-printed, tactile, full of traces of the artist that are not present in digital art. Now, I am not saying there is anything wrong with digital art, there are some ultra talented artists out there, but as a creator, I a just naturally work differently. And so the process for creating the game artwork is a long and intense one.
A short insight into what original print actually is: The process I am using is collagraph. Every image starts as a piece of mountboard. INto this you carve shapes and stick materials that will give dark and light areas, as well as lines, forms and so on. This is then coated in ink. The ink is wiped away but it held in recesses and in textures. Damp paper is then placed over this and it is run through a high pressure etching press. The paper is pushed into the textures and recesses and picks up the ink. Some times I will use 2 3 or even 4 different plates layered on top of each other. The process can be quite inconsistent and printmakers will talk of that ‘perfect’ print they were searching for.
At the start of the project I stated that all artwork would be analogue: hand-printed, hand-crafted, on paper, with a printing press. And when I am in the studio at 2am, trying to get that perfect print, I think it will all be worth it — for a board game that, hopefully, will have a unique visual aesthetic, and genuinely cross that boundary between board game and art work.
