Time management?

What do you do when you are already wondering about the time it will take to fulfil the commitments you have made to producing work?

Do you sign up for another project?

The sensible answer is probably not.

I don’t think I do sensible. I’ve just signed up for a book swop on Artist Books 3.0. I think it is turning into a simplified version of the ruined village book I started last year (which I fully intend to finish when I stop signing up for other things)

These are preliminary drawings. I think I’d like to etch from them but that will have to happen later on a reduced scale.  I don’t have the skills to do an etching big enough for the book size

Testing to destruction

I’ve learned a lot over the past few days about what I can and can’t do with aluminium and copper sulphate. I’ve also found that spit bite with these materials is a lot easier than I had imagined.

I’m fairly please with one of the prints. The starting point for this one had an image already partly worked on it and you can still see more of that in the background than I would like.

The other two plates I managed to ruin completely but I’ve enjoyed the journey.

Continuing

It’s been a frustrating day. I’ve tried a variety of techniques, using traditional and more experimental media to add texture and to stop out the plate.I’m trying not to be too controlled with these prints and more open to accidental markmaking. Some techniques have been more successful than others.

Using a wash of graphic chemical block printing ink mixed with water over the whole plate, and then dropping in meths (it reacts with the water and pushes the pigment into interesting shapes) has worked in the past, but not today. It also takes ages to dry

So I used textured wallpaper to print white acrylic as a resit

I really like the way I can use oil pastel to get a drawn line of resist, using different colours to help me see the different applications between biting

The state of the plates so far:-

And the test prints from them:-

They need working into but I’ll see what happens next

I’ve been reading Jim Dine: A Printmaker's Document. He uses power tools a lot, I think these may be a bit small to attack with a chain saw but I’ve got a Dremel lurking in the cupboard!

Printing Again

Three days into the holidays and I have hidden myself in my workroom. In theory I’m working on a set of three prints (I’ll see how far I get).

 I want them to be fairly abstract but I work best with some reference to reality so I’m working from some photos of shells and fossils that I took a while ago.

To make life difficult I decided that I wanted to work in a square format. I found three 12 cm square plates in the drawer already backed and edges filed. It wasn’t till I turned them over I remembered that they were all marked, left over from another project.  Two aren’t too bad, one has a spot on the corner where I think I must have spilt copper sulphate, and one is pitted in places where I did a very unsuccessful soft ground drawing. The one I decided to use first has the start of a composition with buildings on it. I’m hoping the erasure marks and the left over texture will make the print more interesting.

I started with a soft ground etch to put in the rough composition lines.

Then I decided to blitz the background. I used lipstick as a resist.

I could still see quite a lot of the previous textures so I used a roulette wheel on the background and scraped and burnished bits of the foreground. I did a test print using burnt umber to see how it was going so far.

I’m hoping it might work