Pressure printing bark pattern pieces

This has been a very long process, as I first imagined this a year ago. This is actually the latest picture in the series because it's the process of piecing this bark hanbok after using them to print. I still haven't gotten to the hardest part, which is putting this garment together without being able to turn things inside out, but everything is ready for the final attachments.

To make this piece multitask, I wanted to harvest two prints before I constructed the piece. Last year, I made the bark grids. Then this year I cut out the pattern pieces and arranged them to get one pressure print, and one ghost. The pressure print is a positive print and the ghost will be a positive but will look like a photo negative. Here, what you don't see is the sandwich on top of the press bed: the bark grid, a piece of hanji, and then an inked plexi plate, face down on the hanji. Blankets go on top and then I crank the bed through the press.

Here it is on the other side, so the hanji is stuck to the plate because the ink is sticky and the paper is light, but you see that the bark grid isn't affected by the ink at all (because I carefully selected hanji that is heavy enough so that the pressure of the ink doesn't squeeze through the pores of the paper and get onto the bark).

This is the first print, in positive, of the right and left sides of the jacket.

You can see the plate now still retains the impression of the bark, and has plenty of ink left for a ghost.

This goes through in the traditional sandwich on top of the press bed: inked plate face up, hanji to print on top, a damp heavier sheet behind to hydrate the fine hanji, then newsprint to protect the blankets, then blankets and crank.

Now we have the left and right sides of the jacket still in positive but the look is completely different.

Here are the prints side by side. This was such a good printing day, after a totally disastrous one several days prior. But the lesson was very apparent from the start: if you prep and do everything the way you were taught, not taking shortcuts, everything will go FINE. It's when you rush or try to cheat the process that it falls apart. And in the end, time suspends itself—I thought this would take many hours, but by the time I was done with cleanup, I was at least two hours ahead of schedule.

The goal: three garments from one bark pattern!