I’ve made lots of pictures for my daughter over the years, but not many for my son. My wife asked me to make something special for him.
Then we went for a letterpress jolly with work.
His favourite joke at the time was:
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Mr Bum Poo!
which, for the record should be the hilarious ditty:
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Big bump
Big bump who?
HAHHahahAHAHAHAHA! you said big bum poo!!!!
So I made it. At the work do. Yup.
Had some good news today – 3 of my etchings have been accepted into the New Visions exhibition at the Grant Bradley Gallery opening on Sat Jan 7th 2012 through to the end of the month. This is the first time original DMCropley artwork has gone on sale to the public – hoping for the best! :D
Now that Life Class is over until January next year its time to dig back through the archives and post up classic images from years past. Enjoy…
Morning! It took ages to get my mojo working tonight, but got there in the end. Silly work, getting in the way of drawing… :D
I’ve been working a lot recently on a series of inkings, but I’ve still been trying to put in a day a week down at the print shop. I’ve been experimenting with different inks under the advisement of a few experienced printers that are more than willing to share their knowledge. Turns out though that the technique I’d developed using a certain type of water based ink doesn’t translate across to the more traditional ‘industry standard’ Charbonelle oil based ink. Its fun to have a play though, certainly takes the pressure off… only one useable image out of nine isn’t so good in a production sense though!
I’ve also tried a different smaller size of paper, inspired by the 6×8 charity art competition I’m entering.
It feels like a long while since I’ve been down to the print studio. Picked up these prints today that were pulled on Tues. I’d just got some new fancy Charbonnelle printing ink and had a bit of a play rather than just trying to pull the perfect print each time. Its much more fun this way. Oddly doesn’t feel like you’re producing anything good at the time, but they seem to be growers. Enjoying playing with texture and tone, I’m going to forget about editioning and just get on with it…
Click thumbs for larger images
Had my first full day down at Spike Print today, its great to finally start editioning prints after all the testing. I thought it’d be fun to post up the technique I am developing to render my Dry Point Etchings from Life Class. I’m determined to come up with something that no-one else is doing at the moment so I’ve been experimenting a lot with this method. Each print is individually hand-worked using the Artist Proof as a guide, so there is some variation from print to print. It takes a good half an hour from start to finish so its doubly gutting if it fails. By all means post comments if you have any questions about what I’m doing and I’ll be happy to answer.
Step 1: Warm the dry point etching on a hot plate. This heats the metal so that the printing ink becomes more viscous when it is applied and seeps in the marks more easily.
Step 2: Ink the plate evenly from all directions using a scrap of mount board until the entire surface is covered with flat even tone.
Click to read on… Continue reading Intaglio Printing Step by Step Walk-through / Tutorial
Lots of stuff to post about this week, so I’ll keep it short and simple here. You can see from these 6 images that things certainly don’t always go to plan! I’m finding that the hit rate of good images from each plate is very low indeed. The idea of editions from these things just isnt entering the picture yet. I’m not sure if this is because I haven’t got the technique down pat yet, or whether its going to take a few attempts per plate to get the image I’m looking for. Either way, sure is going to be small run per plate!
Click thumbs below for full size images ;)
No prints to pick up tonight so I thought I’d snap a few shots while I was at the studio…
Click thumbs for fullsize images :D
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
Just picked these up from the print workshop after being away for a couple of weeks. Interesting to see the range of styles and success (or not!) of the printing. Spent last nights session running out an edition from one plate to see how many prints I can get from the aluminium before they get too light – looks like I can only get about 1/2 a dozen before the main lines will need to be re-worked or shelved. Here’s some cheeky photos of the tests I picked up…
As ever, click the thumbnails below for full screen images. tiddly pip!
Dave Cropley 