Dean wanted to make the lithographs using drawing rather than photography to originate the images. Initially using cooked toner from old photocopying machines on Mylar and then black chalk spray, she had to learn to make positive marks in order to create a negative effect. Printmaking by its very nature necessitates this, and what began was an extensive engagement working with a medium that behaved in the complete opposite way to what the artist had been used to. The challenge was to find a way to conjure the ephemeral and internal light of Los Angeles clouds with opaque inks. What appears in the final fifteen lithographs to be so apparently easy belies nearly two years of concentrated experiment by the artist and the printers. Despite looking beguilingly photographic, each image is a drawing, built up of between one and three different layers of cloud imagery, printed with blends for the sky of up to six different colors for each run.