back again! Very rusty tonight as expected, haven’t really drawn anything by hand for about a month (Can’t call Adobe Creative suite ‘drawing’…) so it was good to get back in the game again. The sketchbook drawings are all just warm-ups as I’m focusing on the plates, so they’re just prep work, happy with 2 of the plates so looking forward to printing them next week :D
Thumbnail + click = supersize! pip pip…
Getting into the process now which is all good. Enjoying playing with getting as much tone on to the plate as possible and working the highlights in with an earbud. Its all gloriously low-tech :D The 2 images here show that each print is very different – you never know what you’re gonna get. The idea of an artist’s proof just doesn’t apply yet…
I’ll save you the trouble of having to click thumbnails this time ;)
Back to life drawing next week (28th April) so this is the last look back at sketchbooks of old for a little while. Still got 8 more to go after this one is scanned in…
Click the thumbnails below for full screen images – new pics hot off the press coming next week! :D
Really happy with the prints I picked up tonight :D there’s perhaps a couple in there that I’m going to look at getting framed. Went on to push the technique even further leaving more and more tone on the plate – so I’m excited again at going to pick up the fresh ones next week. The other thing to perhaps try is using oil based inks rather than the water based one I’ve been using so far to get richer darker blacks. Texture appears to be the way forward…
Click the thumbnails below for full screen versions :D
Onwards to Sketchbook_Black_9! Nice to see “2’s company, 3’s a crowd” again. Cop a snook at these puppies… :D
As ever click the thumbnails below for full size versions…
Great session at Spike Print tonight :D Very happy with the proofs that I picked up (posted here) but then went on to produce 6 new prints which I’m dead excited to see next week. I took on board feedback stating that the cleaner more resolved prints that I was producing, though technically competent were just not as interesting as the more grungy, tonal images I lucked out creating early on. So with that in mind I tried hard to get a lot more tone and lighting into the images – and at first glance seeing them come off the press, I reckon its worked a treat! :D Can’t wait to see them next week. Its been a bit of a revelation that I can use the print process to add tone, lighting and shade to the prints. I’ve always shied away from hatching etc as its the enemy of quick, fresh drawing – so If I can get it in at print stage, job done!
As ever, click the thumbnails below for full screen view. Til (hopefully a very interesting…) next time :D
No Life class until the end of the month, so a great chance to go back through the sketchbooks and post up some classic images. There’s a couple of gems in the ones I’m posting tonight – Jack the peg, and Jill the Peg make an appearance… you’ll see them I’m sure. This stems from a picture in an earlier sketchbook where Jill the Peg just popped up out of nowhere… but I digress. Now that I’ve scanned the whole of Sketchbook_Black_10 I’m going to look at trying to wrap all the images up in PDF format for a virtual version of the whole book to flick through. Which is nice. :D
For full screen versions please click the thumbnails below. Til next time…
Managed to crank out 8 prints in tonights 3 hr print sesh which is pretty good going. Starting to get my head round things much more – even started only using the good (read: expensive) paper. Still very much learning though, learnt tonight that if you press hard when intially inking up the plates you scratch the surface as aluminium is so soft – so I’ve basically damaged some of my most successful plates… but thats learning. Just 2 photos from the prints I collected from tonight – the first one is on cheaper paper and as this plate was one of my initial sketchbook replication tests the line is very light and weak:
The 2nd one is on the good quality paper (Somerset Satin) and as well as that I quickly re-worked the line, tracing over it again with an engineers scribe to dig a fresh new line in the plate:
You can see that the line is a lot stronger and more defined. Still trying to work out how many prints I’ll get in an edition, I reckon only about 8 – but if I re-work the line, I’m not sure… and even less sure if this is the right thing to do. Looking forward to collecting the prints next week as that will mean I’ve got artists proofs of all the plates that I’ve produced to date, so I can begin to build editions from my favourite ones. Exciting :D
Dave Cropley 