It's the summer and there's open access to the university's printmaking studios, hence I took this opportunity to play around with some etchings. The following were done with a single zinc plate using soft ground. Quite like the effect of using different inks on a single plate.
This is the project that has been keeping me busy the weeks running up to the Bologna Children's Book Fair. We were given a brief that requires us to produce 4 images that will promote a silent film festival held in New York, Manhattan. The films that were being promoted are films by the following stars: Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and Harold Lloyd. Instead of producing 4 film posters, I decided to use this brief as an opportunity to learn more about the etching process by creating 4 etching portraits. The following are the final results: printed on A3-sized Fabriano paper. The signatures were inked in after the print.
So I went to another etching session last Friday, and continued working on the same Wolf Alice etching plate. This time I learned the sugar lift and aquatint techniques. The technician was also showing another student how to do spit-bite, so now I know how that works as well. The only technique that I have yet to try is hard ground. Saw a student working with that and learned that you can actually work in stages and after adding the hard ground onto an already etched plate, you could still see the previous etching... which allows you to continue working on the same image. Hopefully I can try that this Friday!
The following is the new Wolf Alice print. This isn't complete as I would prefer darker lines and more detail on the trees.
I was experimenting with etching last Friday. Well, maybe 'experimenting' was the wrong word, I was still learning about the technique and still stuck on the basics. I was wondering what the illustrations I did for The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories would look like if reproduced with the etching technique, and so I chose the Wolf Alice illustration and proceeded to do just that.
The following prints were done from an etching using soft ground for a soft pencil-mark look. I actually have not used hard ground and I'm not sure what the effect would have been. In any case, I learned about the hand-wipe, which is a way of cleaning the plate to really remove the ink. Etching is a pretty time-consuming (and expensive!) process, but I just really love the end result! I hope to learn about different-coloured inks and sugar lift in my session tomorrow.
One of my favourite characters of all time has to be Totoro, from the animated film My Neighbour Totoro by Studio Ghibli. I've created a lot of Totoro-related objects as part of my class exercises while I was still with The One Academy.
Kaleidescope of Totoro and Friends!
