Yesterday the children had friends over to play so I escaped to the kitchen with the aim of proofing the alterations I made to the etching plate I'd been working on and to my delight I got all 10 prints (plus a spare and a couple of ghosts) done.
This is the print that I'm donating to Thought Press Project. It's a charity initiative and this year the beneficiaries are a breakfast club charity and a food growing charity which also runs arts and crafts projects. Both work in schools and aim to support children living with food insecurity.
I have repeatedly participated in the 1/many initiative (where printmakers offer small prints in return for a charitable donation of the recipients choice) and made prints which I sold and donated the proceeds to the Ukraine relief effort, I also have one print which carries a £10 donation to a local scout young leader who is going to the World Scout Jamboree this summer. I like that I can create something which does a little good, it feels like a bigger donation than just money (although I do lie donating money and receiving the 1/many prints too!). I really wanted to take part in the Thought Press Project and rather overlooked the fact I'd have to work to a theme which I really don't like doing. The theme was 'animal magic' and I rather thought I could 'cheat' slightly by doing a forest type print and slipping a woodpecker hole in a tree or something else amazing that animals do.
I found an awful lot of evidence of incredible things that animals do in the forest but nothing that easily lent itself to being turned into a print reasonably quickly. I signed up for this in January and the deadline is late April but I was so busy I didn't want to do a reduction linocut, and she does ask that it's possible to produce and donate more than the standard 10 prints if your print is very popular. I thought this would be a good one to try out more etching experiments on.
After the workshop at CSM in the low residency week I invested in a cheap airbrush and canister of propellant so I could apply aquatint. I came up with a design of a spiders web suspended from seedheads and decided that there would be dark seedheads and web etched using soft ground, a medium tone of aquatint and then light seedheads achieved using stop out. The plate looked promising but when I printed it the aquatint was far too dark. I think I etched it for too long... it really does just need seconds! I tried rubbing off far more of the ink but discovered that the soft ground etching lines weren't really holding ink. I wonder if I etched them for too long or the lines were simply too wide to hold ink well.
I sanded back the aquatint and then reapplied it, painting stop out over everything except the lines I wanted to be black and a little hint on the white seedheads - they needed some sort of contrast adding.
I re-etched the plates for less than a minute and removed all the ground. When I reprinted it I was much happier!
There are a lot of 'mistakes' in this. You can see horizontal lines where the ground was brushed on (I've invested in a new, very soft brush to combat this) and some areas are more sanded (so lighter) than others but overall this is a reasonably small (5x7ish) print so I hope the errors are not too noticeable.
It's been a great lesson in how little time a plate needs to be etched for and ways of correcting mistakes. I'm pleased with the contrast and the clear areas of black, white and grey that I've managed to achieve. I just need to figure out how to stop the air brush from clogging now. I think I may have to invest in a compressor for it (so might have to consider selling all the tests and ghosts of this plate as seconds!). I'm going to call it spider magic and get the 10 donation prints in the post this week.