Getting away from purely making paper, this week I have moved onto the printmaking side of things. I continued with my theme of using Heisenberg from Breaking Bad as subject for my prints. For the following print I decided to do a dry point etching because I've only done it once before and felt I needed to play around with it further. This time I was a lot more delicate and precise with my strokes and I tried to do variable toning by using harder and lighter cuts depending on what was needed. I'm really happy with how my print turned out and even more so with the effect it had on my own handmade paper. I tried keeping strokes consistent throughout the etching so that it didn't look messy and on the fly.
Today as I collected these prints from the drying rack, I was sticking other variations into my sketchbook and wondered what else I could do with it. I then decided I wanted to try and do a linoleum print to compliment the etching. The TV show Breaking Bad is primarily based around the empire of blue Methamphetamine, so I wanted a background that would symbolize that. I decided to go with a cracked background which also gave colour to the portrait too. I cut and printed these in fairly quick time, I just need to wait for them to dry so that I can re-print my etching over the top of them. I'm looking forward to the effects!
On a final note, my 3D shapes that I made last week were finally dry! I was able to pop them out of the cookie cutters and get a real look at them. Unfortunately, I had not considered air bubbles to be a problem with the pulp, so that left some gaps which made some of the shapes crumble and break apart. Lesson learned. I am now looking into buying cookie cutters that have some sort of press, so that I can compress my pulp and remove more water and more importantly, air. This will lead to a more solid result and increase drying time...I hope.
Great John :)
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