After spending the night at the home of artist Ashley Cooper and her family in the surprisingly beautiful Cooperstown, New York, I headed over to the rolling hills of Otego to meet with Tim Sheesley at Corridor Press.

Tim  showed me samples of other artist's work to give me some ideas of how I might use the medium in my own work.  I was thinking a lot about this myself.  The research I have been doing over the last weeks not only into lithography, but also other forms of print making, made me think how I might best use the medium to expand what I was doing in paint. But until I get my hands dirty, I am not really going to know what will work best for me. I am especially interested in the ways I can use print making to explore the use of color in my work.

There are two ways of going about this (I am sure there are more, but these are the ways that most interest me at the moment). One is to use what printers call "process" color. That is to break down the image into CMYK - cyan, yellow, magenta and black. This is also the way the color is broken down to make a straight forward reproduction of a piece.  When an artist uses this method of separation, its a little like math for artists, as they have to think about the layering of colors to achieve a full color variation. The other way to approach the print is to pull particular colors from the original and lay them down distinctly, one next to the other. There can be some mixing, of course. But since you may not have the elements of a color wheel -- red, yellow, blue -- but colors like umber, lavender and ocher, it is far more likely that you would lay them down next to each other and not over each other.

I love seeing how artists use lithographs and all the variations involved:  the type of plate, the quality of ink, color of paper, and the drawing medium.Here is a video of Tim showing me how Sondra Freckelton produced the print pictured above.  I took the video without looking through the camera, so that Tim wouldn't think about it while talking to me. Please forgive the occasional missing head.  Video of Tim Sheesley. You can check out the prints of the artists featured here at Tim's website:Corridor Press.