This week, I've finally been let back in the studios after an entire semester of working from home. I have big plans so I need to be in as much as possible. Fortunately, my tutor has etched and proofed most of my stones already. I want to reprint a few such as the spider one and the pig in the pram because I originally wanted them to be bleed prints so I didnt clean up the borders as much as I would have liked. I also need to etch and print the two stones I completed over easter.
Going into this week, I was very concious over how I went about my printing. Being part of the RBA exhibition made me realise that although the actual image was good, I hadn't paid much attention to the whole process before and my previous prints were kind of lacking in quality. This time round, I'm going to try and pay special attention to keeping the paper clean, keeping the image registered correctly and making sure the image doesn't fluctuate in tone between prints. In some of my other prints, you can see that some of the images are quite darker than others and I want to avoid that this time round.
When I finally got back into the studios, my tutor offered me an even bigger stone. I don't know if I'll have time to work on it before the end of the semester but I really want to use it. Its about twice the size of some of my biggest prints so itll probably take a long time to draw up. If I don't get to finish it, I might ask to finish it after the semester has ended. I really don't want to miss the opportunity to work on it, especially since after this semester, I'll have to start paying to use printing studios.
Another thing thats been on my mind lately is the addtional work we have to complete to complement our main project. I was thinking about maybe doing some faux mezzotints since I really enjoyed doing them last year and it would be fun to get back into the process. I was thinking that I could do some more portraits, like the ones I've done before where I replaced the heads with animals or skulls etc. I think these would look really good as mezzotints, especially if I did them in an old portraiture style like the ones that were done after paintings. I also wanted to think about the characters of the people I'm changing and how that relates to the the changes I make. Before, I didnt really think about who the people were as I already had an image in my head of what I wanted to happen. But it might be interesting to go into it blind and see what I come up with from the orginal portrait.