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In the Studio with Pace Prints: Positive Transparencies

Artsy Editorial
Sep 10, 2013 6:55PM

Among glass-top drawing tables, Watanabe explains the steps in creating a transparency, used to expose an image to a screen: “These artists are doing two different methods,” he says. “One is directly drawing a picture with ink on a film called mylar. [The other] is to draw a picture on paper. If that’s the case, we scan the image and transfer it to a computer image—computerize it, and change it, so that you can change the size easily.” He motions to a darkroom filled with dusty enlargers that are no longer needed to print transparencies. “Then we have a printer for that, [which prints] up to 42 inches wide, and the film comes out in a roll, so we can make it bigger. So now, we have a film, and we call it a positive. The real name is positive transparency. So just like in old-fashioned photography, in the darkroom, you shoot the film—in that case it’s a negative, right? This is a positive.”

Photographs by Alex John Beck 

Next: Preparing the Screen

Artsy Editorial