MA Week 69 - Pressing on with printmaking and Frances Morris talk

Reflection on the past week, 23rd May 2017

Pressing on with printmaking and Frances Morris talk

Developing the drypoint

I’ve developed my drypoint following the circles I etched with the dividers last week. As well as the dividers, I'd bought a circle stencil which proved ideal for drawing the circular shapes both on paper and ultimately on the plate. I sketched out a series of shapes from the mini-dérive, working to relate the shapes to each other and to balance the sketch with a variety of shapes and sizes. I also experimented with textures and shading, and was quite pleased with the result. I then flip-photocopied it and drypoint etched it into Perspex.  As always I found curved shapes difficult to draw - seems the trick is to move the plate rather than the needle.  The idea of this is to form an underneath layer of a two or three layer drypoint of the walk. It gave a reasonable result but I will probably work further into it to try to get a bit more variation in depth, following on from last week’s results. I printed it in blue (process cyan) as I wanted to take one of the colours of the walk, namely that of the railings outside the former Burley Library.

 

The shapes of the overlooked urban environment

Yesterday I went out at lunchtime and did a couple of very quick sketches which might act as a “top layer” to this plate. I’d drawn outdoors previously but taken quite a bit of time over each sketch. These were done quickly, and I was amazed at the amount of visual information you can get down within 5 minutes.

 

Houses; visual note
 

More soft ground troubles.

Following on from last week's experiment, I tried again with pressing plant materials into a soft ground. Last week I used an old plate that I'd acquired and stripped back. This week I used a similar plate plus a brand new one. I sanded them both back equally and cleaned them to within an inch of their life following my hunch of last week. However... still no joy. The ground still came away. So it isn't the plate, given I’d used an old and a new one, and it can’t be the cleaning either. It must be something to do with the preparation and/or the etching. More investigations needed.

 

“Troubling Time” conference paper

I've started to write the paper for the "Troubling Time" conference in Manchester on 1st June. I am going to introduce my research and my practice, then invite the participants to produce a visual work which "troubles time". This is based on the organisers' encouragement of contributions which “engage practically with their duration, with the aim of fostering methodological diversity”. I don’t know if people will engage with it, and it’s already pushing me out of my comfort zone, but that’s probably a good thing.

On a related note, I've just heard that the walking event scheduled for 1st June has been postponed for a couple of reasons. This is a shame but it does mean that I will be able to attend the whole day at the conference which will be good.

Frances Morris talk

Finally I went to an excellent talk by Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern, last night. She is a very engaging, interesting speaker and I learnt a lot about "behind the scenes at museums" from her Talk. I've summarised the points most salient to my own practice in this blogpage.

 

 

MA Week 67 - Two weeks for the price of one

Reflection on the past fortnight, 8^th May 2017

 

I’ve just realised that I’ve lost count of the weeks somewhere, and that I was going to end up having 81 weeks in an 80 week course, so I’ve combined the past two weeks. I’ve done quite a lot, too.

 

Sketching and etching

I did a final sketch of St Paul’s (see also this week 65 blogpost) which still wasn’t brilliant, but allowed me a further chance to play with perspective. I don’t know why I found it so difficult; possibly it was because I was trying to alter the perspective from the photo I was using. Next day I transposed it to one of the little copper plates and worked on this for a couple of days. It still wasn’t a brilliant drawing, but the etching worked and I got some prints out of it. I used the needle with the slanted edge (I think it’s called an echoppe) which worked well when making curved shapes. I also used a roulette wheel to give some texture to the blossoms and leaves and I was surprised by how deeply it bit. It took so deeply in relation to the etched lines that I didn’t think they had bitten. I imagine I probably dug too far in with the wheel.

One result of this was that the blossoms were obscured. I thought about drypointing them in, but Mike suggested regrounding, re-etching and re-biting the plate. This seemed like a good way to learn about multiple grounding. I used liquid hard ground again and the resulting re-work certainly gave more definition. However there was a lot of “foul bite”, with dots here and there. I then realised I’d not cleaned the plate before re-grounding, so presumably there were dots of grease that resisted the ground. Possibly not ideal, but a lesson learnt. Also the dots gave some texture, so possibly a slightly happy accident.

 

Springtime St Paul's

 

I had intended to grind this off the plate and do a completely different design, but I’d learnt so much from this little plate that I’ve kept it, for now at least.

 

On Saturday and Sunday I attended the “Etching Weekend” at the West Yorkshire Print workshop in Mirfield. It was excellent. I worked with two images; a photo of Assisi I’d taken on holiday a few years ago, which I knew would work up into different areas of tone, and an image of some tulips from my mini-dérive with Michelle.  

On the Saturday we prepared and etched a hard ground plate, for which I used the Siena image. I’d already practised a lot of this technique but I learnt a lot of hints and tips. We also prepared a soft ground plate. It was really interesting to see the nuances of different workshops. 

On Sunday we started with the soft ground plate, into which I pressed some plant materials that were just growing outside the window. I then traced the photo of some tulips into the ground. I was surprised how dark and crayony the marks bit; the soft ground is very fragile compared to the liquid hard ground I’ve been using in college.

 

Assisi aquatint

 

The next stage was aquatint, and I decided to aquatint both plates. Our technician, Kate, applied the actual rosin powder but I would like to learn how to do this. I’d worked out the tones I wanted for the Assisi print and it was a bit tedious applying the stop out varnish to achieve this, not really knowing what the outcome would be. I was very pleased with the result considering it is a first effort. It printed rather too dark but Kate showed us how to adjust the transparency of the ink to allow lighter-toned printing.

 

Sepia tint tulips

The plant material images and the heavy drawing marks of the tulips don’t necessarily belong on the same plate, but they don’t look too bad together and this serves as a really good test/ideas plate for future soft ground use. Kate helped me to print it in colour. I would have liked to have picked her brains further on that point, but time didn’t permit. All in all an excellent weekend.
 

 A moan retracted
 

I mentioned in this week 63 blogpost that I’d submitted a conference abstract and heard nothing. It transpires that an email must have got lost somewhere in the ether as it had been accepted! This caused a panic as the conference had been extended to two days and my panel clashed with the walking event with Zoë and Lynne. Fortunately the organisers were mighty accommodating and have moved my panel to the morning so I can do both events. So that’s a paper to write added into the plan then!
 

Otherwise…
 

I was away over the weekend, which was great, so other than that I’m desperately trying to catch up with my creative journal. It’s good reflecting back with the benefit of hindsight but I really wish it was a bit more up-to-date!