It was 1973 in Terlingua, Texas when photographer Peter Leighton captured a moment of Willie Nelson’s performance during a tumultuous night set. He discovered it years later, restored the film negative, and is working with Flatbed to create a very limited polymer photogravure edition. Artist/photographer and printmaker Matthew Magruder is collaborating with Peter to create the small special chine collé edition to be released this year. Matthew’s blog chronicles the development of the photographic plate which is used to print the image. Matthew uses a direct-to-plate etching technique that is faithful to the photographic image but gives a depth and dimension that normal photographic printing cannot match.

Read on to learn more about Matthew’s process which is reposted from his blog and stay tuned to learn more about the release of the finished prints.

Willie Nelson - Polymer Photogravure Commission
by Matthew Magruder

Overview of making the polymer photogravure plate

Before I get into anything. HUGE thank you to Clay Harmon who has been a mentor, advisor, and (most importantly) friend for over 15 years. He’s taught me more about photographic processes than I will ever be able to thank him for adequately. Plus he’s 1/2 of Mountain Intaglio. That’s where all these polymer plates and such come from. Buy from them they’re awesome.

I’ve been asked to collaborate with Flatbed Press and Peter Leighton on a small edition of Polymer Photogravure prints of one of Peter’s photographs. It’s an understatement to say this is exciting.

The first step is that I received the high-resolution scan from Peter Leighton of his (amazing) 35mm negative of the great Willie Nelson from the 1970s at the Texas Chili Fest in Terlingua, Tx out near Big Bend.

We determined that we would be making a roughly A3 sized plate (10x15” roughly) that would be inked and printed on a 1/2 sheet—15x22”—of standard sized printmaking paper. Paper choice to be determined after proofing.
I always try and size my image file to be smaller than the plate size that is being used as this gives me some breathing room around the image area to handle the polymer plate.
It’s better to trim off a bit of polymer than to pull an “efficiently” printed to the edge plate from the Epson printer just to have your finger slip and you ruined a giant piece of polymer plate. I’ve done this too many times.

Back to the digital workflow part. Next up, I didn’t do any drastic edits to the file in photoshop as Peter knows what he’s doing. The main things is that I want to ensure some 100% K (black) exists in the file as this is evident from the scan but your brain and eyes can deceive you because it’ll make 95% K look like true black and then you go to ink and print the plate wondering why you don’t have a true black.

In short, we were good, already a good bit of 100% K in the 16-bit grayscale 300+dpi TIFF file.

I resized it and onto printing the DTP plate.

What does that mean DTP?

This is going to be a good bit of info but also just skimming the surface of the process.
DTP stands for Direct-to-plate. It’s a process of making a continuous tone monochrome polymer photogravure plate that uses the matte (mK) ink from an Epson printer to print a positive on the polymer plate by running the plate directly through the printer.

This contrasts with the previous 2 Exposure method of this process that utilizes both a stochastic screen exposure and then a positive exposure.

This DTP method is a noticeably more simplified version of the 2-exp method which is in-turn an even more profoundly simplified version of the traditional copperplate photogravure process.

These polymer plates are also noticeably more durable to larger editions, which is a nice benefit.

People smarter than myself discovered that the Epson mK ink has a “stochastic” pattern when it lays down ink so it creates accomplishes that step and the positive step all in one exposure.


Printing onto the plate

I use Mountain Intaglio plates. I like the 43sm plates but they are thin and that can make them prone to bending. The 83sm plates are a good bit thicker and nice for larger plates.

I load the plate with some glue dots on the back into a window carrier made from two pieces of 2-ply matte board. The top piece has a window cut out to accommodate whatever size plate I’m printing on. This helps trick the printer into thinking it’s printing onto poster board. This window carrier is loaded into my Epson P800.

I use PrintTool (see above) to send info to Quad-P800 printer that was installed using the QTR (QuadToneRIP) with a custom ink profile specific to the 43SM plates (or whatever plate is being used).

This a rough overview of a fairly complicated process. If you are interested in this I highly recommend the book that Clay wrote on Polymer Photogravure and the tools that Richard Boutwell has available.

Fingers crossed that ink gets thrown down cleanly and no tech issues arise.
Queue the Borat “Great Success” GIF.

Exposing the DTP printed plate

Now we’re onto exposing the polymer plate to UV light.

You want to aim to flood the plate with a sufficient amount of even UV light to adequately harden the plate. This will create the “tooth” or pins and needles of various depth/spacing/etc to hold ink on the plate and create your 0% K (white) all the way to 100% K (full black). Again though, that’s an over-simplification of the process

The key here is to have a way to expose the plate to a calibrated amount of UV light. The sun is an obvious choice as it’s readily available (at least here in Texas in June). The unfortunate part is that it’s quite difficult to to have a calibrated output of UV light without having fancy UV measuring tools. There’s a few different ways to do that: you could construct a box with a bunch of UV flashlights packed together, or UV LED strips, or (as in my case) you have an old NuArc 26-1K exposure unit from probably the 1980s with a giant Metal Halide bulb in it.
Fingers crossed it never gives out on me.

I figured out through testing and calibration that the optimal amount of exposure to sufficiently harden the polymer plate is 100 units on my NuArc. As a point of reference, when I teach at Flatbed, their bigger NuArc requires 360 units. The “units” here is pretty irrelevant as it’s based on a UV measuring tool in the unit so it different for each. But a generally good starting point is however many units equals 5 mins+/- for these 43sm plates.

Processing the plate after UV exposure

Now that all that polymer has been hardened at the calibrated amount we need to get rid of the polymer in the plate that wasn’t. I place the plate in a tray of water and gently and randomly scrub it with a brush for 4mins (see below images). The water dissolves the unhardened polymer.

Scrub at random. You’ll also notice all the Epson ink gets scrubbed off in this stage as well.

After the 4 mins are up I pull the plate and let the excess water drain. At this stage you can start to see the image on the plate. Now it’s onto drying the plate as efficiently and quickly as possible.

I use microfiber towels to get the vast majority of the water off by gently pressing the plate with my hands gently dabbing with a dry and clean microfiber towel. After most of the water is dabbed off I will hit the plate with a hairdryer for a few mins until the plate is warm to the touch.
Now some time with a hairdryer. Careful not to hit the plate.

The last step of polymer plate-making not to be overlooked

You’ll notice that the plate looks great at this point and it’s an exciting moment to see the image on the plate and want to get to printing. You could do at this point but sadly you’d likely get one really beautiful photogravure print and then the second would look less great and then worse on the next.

That’s because you gotta remember to harden the plate. This step takes all that polymer that’s been correctly process and nails it all down so countless prints can be inked and printed from it.

Don’t skip this step.

You can use that same UV exposure unit or in my case the sun in Texas is blazing hot right now. So I just take the plate outside and put it in direct sun. If you use the UV exposure unit I harden for at least the 1.5x the original exposure. If it’s outside in bright sun, I’ll leave it for 15mins or so. You can’t overburden so it you forget about it, meh.

Look at how badass that is.

Now it’s onto printing the polymer photogravure plate.

I’ll create another post after Peter and I meet to do a proof printing day.