Etching experiments

I am working at the moment on a book that I'm hoping to print using gum arabic transfer. I’ve written the words and worked out a provisional layout. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on the images.

These are some of the earlier thoughts.

 I took photos of them to use to work out the layout and for some reason the black and white drawings seemed to have developed a slight colour cast. I exaggerated this in photoshop and like it so much that I’m going to try and replicate it for the final images.

I’m struggling a bit at the moment though because the words need a landscape format but the images for the individual pages want to be portrait.

I’d spent so much time working in charcoal that I hadn’t anything worked out to take to the press this week so I decided to crop a section of one of the charcoal drawings and try to translate it into an etching. 

I used different tapes, lipstick, marker pen, oil pastel and Vaseline as resists. I’ve only just discovered Vaseline and it’s great for making brushstrokes. Because nothing needed to dry, unlike traditional grounds, and because I only put the plate in the copper sulphate for a minute at a time the image developed really quickly.

The two proof states aren’t good finished prints but I’ve enjoyed just playing and seeing what happens. It's ended up more painterly than my prints usually do. I think I’m going to do more with this in between other projects.