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