An ugly baby

This is a quick attempt at a relief etching. I thought of trying it after looking at Anish Kapoor's print in the Printmaking book. I actually thought his was an etching, but then when I looked it up online to double check (after fruitlessly looking for relief etching/intaglio) I found out it was a wood etching. I thought I'd still try it, and found out that it actually isn't too difficult if you are well prepared. This print is dirty for a number of reasons, namely because I don't have the patience tonight to clean it up, but also because regular techniques for cleaning a plate don't fair as well. Hand wiping is still the best technique without tools, but if i had q-tips then I think it'd come out spotless. At least on the relief area.
I originally wanted to only ink the raised spots, but that failed pretty much immediately. I thought if I just left the plate in the experimental bath for a few hours the acid would create enough contrast and I wouldn't have to worry about catching the ink scraper on the recessed regions. Nope. It looks like to get that kind of contrast I would need to leave the plate in the bath for at least a week. At least if I want it to be as easy as woodcut inking. That's really what I thought it would be like. At least hoped. Woodcut inking is so much easier, but of course it couldn't be that way with etching. I'll give it a week or two in the bath after I print a few more reverse prints a bit cleaner. (Reverse being in comparison to my original intentions.)

I saw this today in the Weatherspoon

Josef Albers

I can't believe I've been missing out on this for so long.

"Support". Early Stage.

Here's the most recent version of this plate, based off of a project where I was to establish a set of guidelines for getting marks on the plate, but could not do any of the marking myself. My guidelines were as follows:

-Give the plate to my folks for them to have during my bicycle race, which they would be spectating.
-Put the plate amongst the feet of the crowd, and forget about it until after the race.

The rules were pretty basic, but my mama took rein while I was racing and made sure to stomp it every time I crossed the finish line. I'm not bothered by this in the least, because really the project was about support. If she wanted to show her support by stomping my plate, so be it. You don't always have control over everything in life.

Here's a glimpse at the plate. It turned out rather pretty with natural areas of heavy and light lines, and there is an element of depth and clearing towards the center that I really like. What I'm trying to focus on now is getting the plate as clean as possible by honing my wiping skills, which have been my biggest weakness thus far. This is an especially good plate to practice my wiping skills on because the deep, coarse lines burnt into the plate tend to smear if too much pressure is added by the palm in the last stage of cleaning. In this way the plate is a sensitive indicator of how much pressure I should be applying, and though it is a bit maddening, it is proving helpful already.

Death of a Mouth

Something happened

about five minutes into killing this plate. I started to hate it. I named it a few times, pulling combinations from a list of four letter words I had in the back of my vocabulary, and began telling myself I would never find reason in the future to do this again. Then, like most monotonous and painful processes, the pain and monotony faded away into the process. I found a good method, stuck with it, cut myself a few times, tucked in my shirt, and then proceeded to kill my plate. I thought about getting it totally clean, and even got a little giddy at the idea of wiping it out completely, but as I got further into the demolition I began liking what bones were left when I printed. A very photocopyish look took over as the plate developed rolls and smoothed grooves, and I rather liked it. Unfortunately I kept killing until that passed and I was left with just a little bit left, and then I lost interest in it, printed it for the last time, and stopped.

Etching I

La boca fea.
This was my first attempt at an etching. To test the waters, I wanted to do a varied amount of line widths, seeing how close I could get them without mashing them up, and seeing how detailed I could get everything together. I stippled a bit (with good results) and did a few different areas of tight lines. The image itself was default, because I didn't really care about what I was etching as much as how much I was etching it. This was more an experiment, so:

What I liked
I was pleased with how much detail I got from the needle in the asphaltum. Some of the stippling I did was so minute I thought it wouldn't appear, but to my surprise everything showed up as I had drawn in on the plate.

What I didn't Like
I was displeased with my wiping skills. I had a poor cleaning style, I thought, because my prints kept turning out a bit grey, and sometimes blotchy. This actually worked out a few times, and coupled with seeing what Garret did to his prints with ink experimentation, it led to my last print being strengthened by its blotches. That isn't to say it was a great rpint, or that it was necessarily strongest. What ended up dissapointing me in the end was just my lack of control. In an extreme case, like my last print, I had better luck because the idea of a properly wiped plate was lost within the overdone inking. I didn't have to worry about clean edges or uniform clarity, because the outcome was meant to be a mess. I wont always want to be printing purposefully messy prints, so I need to focus on tuning my skills so that my range of work can broaden.

I fucked up the drypoint, but that will be amended when I learn the proper printing process for drypoint.

The frame I did was pretty bland. I wanted to put a frame or two around and within the piece (mainly because of some beautiful Max Klinger prints I saw that incorporated interesting, interactive frames), but the outside one just seemed kinda bland. That isn't so much a big deal in comparison to some other aspects I didn't like, especially because I can easily amend it, but I was still a little disapointed. I would have changed it up a bit in this print but I lost interest in it when I got into a few different processes.

Ultimately, this piece wasn't a stunner, or a flop, or a beauty. It wasn't supposed to be though. It was a good experiment, and a modest first step.