I reworked the owl and boat etching to get the blacks blacker and ran about six more prints. With the emu etching I stayed a bit loose and found that the one emu was enough. The smaller one in the background of the photo just added confusion. But and this is a big “but”, I cannot get rid of the edge of these plexi-glass plates. It shows in the print no matter how well I wipe it off. The saw and then the sander create a texture that just soaks up the ink and will not release it. And of course it is never evenly colored. Blotchy at best. So I was thinking this morning, “what happens if I cut off the border and use the emu another way?”
AND I wanted to color in his beautiful large brown eyes with watercolor paint. Once those eyes got the color it changed him into something more animated, something more lively. So I decided to take him back to Australia by way of using the paper tea bags from tea drunk down under and shifu threads I had made using the soils of Australia to color them. I like the result below.
This piece is signed by the colors of Australia on the left and my name and color from my driveway on the right. It is on an 11 x 14 paper and will be matted in cream with an eight by ten opening. When I finished that one, I went to the gum tree from two weeks ago and chose an artist proof done in an umber ink. I matched it with some tea bags and more shifu threads stitched into the piece. Again it is signed by Australia and myself.
They are reminiscent of the altered wood block prints that I scanned into my computer a few years back and then added the cloth and other bits from Australia. I sold out of most of those while in Australia in 2014. Here is an image of one of those.
I like the new ones better. Something about using the limited edition of prints made with dry point etching on plexi-glass. Only so many can be printed and then the burr of the line gets pushed down and does not hold the ink as well.
It has been an interesting process getting the details using this type of printmaking technique. There is still a whole lot of daylight between Rembrandt’s etchings and mine….but I feel better about my own the more I do.
As far as the stitching into them goes, it seems a natural influence of the scrapbook pages I have also been working on. Here is the fifth decade.
