RESIDENCY AWARD: JUSTIN STEINBURG

Our second recipient of our 2009 residency award was Justin Steinburg, fourth year BFA (bachelor of fine art) student at Queen’s University. Justin came to stay with us at Spark Box Studio for a weekend in mid January 2010. He arrived with a car full of waterless lithography plates and woodcuts ready to print. When attending a residency it is always best to try and maximize your time printing by preparing material ahead of the determined residency.

His first day of the residency was spent printing plates and printing a three color separation woodcut. Using little ink to a fair amount of transparent base Justin’s woodcut shows the potential for color change when using transparent inks. This woodcut is from his thesis year at Queen’s university which focuses on color theory.

The second day of Justin’s residency with us we experimented with powdered pigments that he had bought from a supplier in Ottawa. He brought with him a wide range of different pigment colors, everything from primary colors to metallic bronze, silver, gold and iridescent pearl white (which was comically named ‘super sparkle’). We spent the day mixing up pigments into transparent base and testing the results. The basic colors mixed and print really well and printed just like inks out of a can. The metallic colors were a different story. We tried to mix the bronze and everything seemed to go alright but when it was printed it ended up printing splotchy and transparent. The obvious result was to add more pigment and stiffen up the ink, this produced better results. Out of the metallic colors the ‘super sparkle’, iridescent pearl, worked the best, producing a tinted white that had a great shine was we considered a success.