Exhibitions at Impact, Part 1

One of the best aspects of Impact was having so many printmaking exhibitions right there on the university campus where the conference was being held. I saw almost everything, I think, but all of it far too quickly. I could have spent at least twice as long!

As I raced around, I took as many photos as I could to share, although all with my iPhone. I know that some people who read this blog can't make it to many exhibitions, so I've chosen my favourites for you to see.

Gosia Wlodarczak: 

a Polish-born artist who lives in Australia. This was the only video work at the conference, as far as I am aware. I was drawn to both its subject matter, and the fact that the style has a clear connection to digital imagery. There were numerous papers about video (I didn't attend any) but it shows that working with moving images has appeal for printmakers.

The Train Trip

You can see a lot more about this work (including a 7 minute version) here.

Jan Hogan:

an Australian artist who I believe has recently completed her PhD. There is a little more about that work here. She also presented a paper at the conference - some details here.

Becoming



The sense of layering and networking in this work is beautiful.

Dylan Martorell & Mat Valdman

These works were enchanting! The top print filled the wall, while the lower two were viewed through a device reminiscent of the old "Viewmaster" (hence the blurry photos). There's an interview with Martorell here and this is his blog.

Hapmoniym (digital printed wallpaper)

Hinteridact (digitally altered screenprint, slide, slideviewer)

Sally Smart

I am pretty sure I've mentioned Sally Smart's work here before. Like many others, I find it captivating and inspiring. To be honest, this is the first opportunity I've had to see it in a gallery, so I was quite excited. This work was part of a group show entitled "The Devil had a Daughter". I've included Sara in the shot to give you an idea of scale. Smart's website is here.

Paul Liam Harrison, Scott Hudson & Andy Rice:

500 Years and the Complaint of the Black Knight 

I'm sorry to have to admit that this poem was unknown to me before seeing this work. Now I know that The Complaint of the Black Knight is the oldest surviving dated printed Scottish book (from 1508). Written in fact by John Lydgate, it was falsely attributed to Chaucer (all this according to Wikipedia, of course!)

I walked around and around the room, and loved the rolling Scottish tones, but was able to understand "nairy a wud"! I felt compelled to make a recording to share, but of course had to cut it short when a crowd entered the room talking at the tops of their voices. If you press play, maybe you'll get a tiny taste.

 

I have more photos of work to share next time, as well as my thoughts about some of the papers I attended. It's 9 days till work starts in our kitchen. Tearing up the floor tiles is first on the agenda ( dust and noise - my favourites!). I may be kidding myself, but I'm thinking there will be a lot of time sitting around, not being able to leave the house when I might be able to get online and catch up on my blogging. Am I crazy?

Drypoint: Using cardboard and perspex plates

 

Last week I showed you how I made the covers for the altered book I’m working on for “Books…Beyond Words”. This week I’d like to show you how the next stage is coming. I’ve been doing tests with drypoint using both card and Perspex (acrylic) for the plate.

For the book I need an image of a cocoon. I think I’ve mentioned (just a few times!) how much I want to learn etching, but the trouble is I have a few projects on-the-go, and a personal (exciting!) deadline of mid-May (more later!!!). I can foresee that a number of attempts might be needed before I can etch to my satisfaction!

Then this article from Nontoxic Print.com arrived in my inbox, showing me the way. I made the decision to try drypoint, also an intaglio print method, but a direct one, and therefore rather more straight forward than etching.

In the article Jenny Robinson discusses how she makes her large (e.g. 38” x 23”) drypoint monoprints using illustration board as her plate. She applies a thin coat of wood varnish and then treats the plate as she would any other drypoint.

With the high (and increasing) cost of copper and zinc, I thought this was definitely worth a try. As Robinson notes, cheaper materials provide the artist with more freedom to experiment, because you feel as if you can throw away something that hasn’t worked – and artistic freedom is always good, in my book!

Another cheap material that is often used for drypoint plates is plastic. I’ve heard of people trying virtually any type. Actually my kitchen chopping mat has some interesting lines appearing on it, and I’m thinking of swiping it and inking it up, but first I need to buy a replacement for the kitchen. More common choices are mylar and perspex, so I decided to give perspex a try too.

Tools, ink, paper 

Apart from ink and paper, this photo shows everything I used. For paper I used two different Japanese papers in buff, one a medium kozo and the other with a little more texture.

I compared two inks, an oil-based etching ink from Graphic Chemical and a water-based one from Akua. The second ink was self-mixed using transparent intaglio base and the Akua Kolors, rather than the pre-mixed intaglio inks that are available. It really needed the addition of some thickener, which I didn’t have (but now do).

Tests & Results

1) Initially I began testing with tools that I had on hand – an etching needle (above – yellow handle) which I had used before for this my only previous drypoint (plate: perspex).

I knew I would want some tone as well as line in this print. I don’t own a roulette, the tool often used for achieving tone. In the article, Jenny Robinson talked about using carborundum, but the art store was out of stock. Initially, I decided to test some dry pumice (in the Matisse jar above) applied with acrylic gel.

The result wasn’t bad, but the tone is more in the style of a collagraph, and that isn’t the look I am after.

2) Next I inked the plate with my self-mixed Akua. The ink was much softer and the textural effect of the pumice is lessened (pardon the shadow that’s come through on the scan).

I wasn’t happy with the tone alone, and tried sketching in some detail in pencil.

3) I decided to add more line detail to the plate using an engraving attachment on the Dremel. I also tried wiping more lightly, so that more ink would remain on the plate.

I did quite like this result, but I felt the image now had a “man-made/machine” look to it. It’s an interesting effect, but I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted for the book.

Here’s the plate (on the right) and the print again, this time using Akua ink. You can see I started experimenting with the Dremel’s mark-making abilities.

4) I wanted to test the Dremel further and decided to use line to achieve tone, a traditional drypoint/engraving technique. The plate here is perspex for the first time.

The result was a very controlled and neat image, almost illustrative.

5) At this stage I made another trip to the art store and decided to splash out on a “proper” drypoint tool (you can see it in the photo under Tools). I was pining for that special soft line that you can achieve when your tool lifts a burr from the plate. It is this that holds the ink and gives the drypoint its characteristic “look”.

And there it is over on the right side. All those lovely lines! I’ve finally worked it out!

Still no carborundum at the art store, so I bought some Golden fine pumice gel, which you can see holds the ink quite beautifully. There are also tests with three different grades of sandpaper (150, 280 and 400 – reversed).

6) So finally I tried with my new scribe on a cardboard plate with the oil-based ink. I’m still working on my wiping technique, but this print is the best result so far.

Safer etching with copper sulphate

This has been a really slow week for me again, as I’ve had to take some time to recover from attending a workshop last week-end. I have a number of things I’m keen to share with you all but I just couldn’t spend much time online, and even commenting or replying to comments has been too much.So please accept my apologies if you have posted recently and I haven’t been it touch.

 

Do you remember that wonderful blue liquid in the science lab at school? It was my favourite colour at the time, and I always remember it was copper sulphate. We didn’t often use it in the experiments we worked on, but it was a personal favourite (I know, who has a favourite chemical? I was a weird kid!)

So it was quite nice to find that copper sulphate can be used as an etch for printmaking and that it is one of the least toxic options.

These past few years I’ve been quite enamoured of etching, while at the same time being a bit scared of the chemicals involved. I realize that ceramics involves some nasty things too, but the thing that worries me about etching is it’s acid (ouch!) AND it gives off fumes.

I’ve been very hesitant about delving into etching because if it’s going to work for me, I need to be able to set myself up here in my home. A lot of people with CFS/ME have severe chemical sensitivities, and while it’s not really a major problem for me, perfumes have been known to make my nose run and give me a bit of a headache. I don’t need to add to my problems by exposing myself to further potential neurological damage by introducing toxins to my home.

 

So when I saw that Impress Printmakers were holding a workshop on Sunday on etching aluminium with copper sulphate, advertising it as a cheaper, low-toxic alternative, suitable for the home studio, I was quick to enrol. After the workshop I did some research online, particularly here and here, and discovered that the process really is low toxic. A very small amount of hydrogen gas is created, but it really isn’t considered dangerous, even inside, and I am planning to work out on our covered patio.

 

So perhaps I can really get on my way with printmaking now. Above I’ve posted scans of the two plates I made at the workshop. They both need further work to develop some strong blacks, but it was great fun getting this far. I’m actually really drawn to the plates themselves, and can see they may become artworks/book covers themselves. Has anybody else tried etching with copper sulphate?

Pigment prints on Hahnemuhle

You might remember that a few posts back it was my 200th post and a I gave away three prints to celebrate. Now that they have safely arrived in their new homes, I thought I would share them with you all.

They were pigment prints on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag using the imagery I developed for my book, "Judy and the Jacaranda". Although many of the components appear in the book, these prints are unique in bringing the imagery together on a single surface, rather than layering it on translucent vellum. These compositions also differ to a lesser or greater degree from the book.

 Spring 1, 2009

Autumn 1, 2009

 

Autumn 2, 2009

I’m planning to sell these as a limited edition, printed on A4 Hahnemuhle Photo Rag. I’m working on a new website with paypal facilities, but if you can’t wait, just email me at potsrme at hotmail dot com.

Gocco prints on acetate

I had a lovely time on Friday afternoon printing these using a screen made with my gocco machine and taking photos of the process to show you all. I didn't realize that it was all a waste because of the ink I was using...but I'll explain that later.

For those of you unfamiliar with a gocco, this is what one looks like. It's a Japanese crafters tool which allows you to create screens for printing, in a process closely related to silk screen printmaking.

I bought my machine probably 18 months ago, enticed by the fact that you can print both on paper and on clay (using different inks). I only recently got around to testing it out, and this page for "Judy and the Jacarandah" is my first use of the gocco for a project.

The pages are wet media acetate, and herein lies some of the issues I've been experiencing. The printing process required a bit of refinement and a move to "off-contact" printing. If you've done screen printing, you'll know that this means that when you pull the ink across the screen, the screen doesn't actually lie on your paper or whatever substrate you are printing on, it sits above it, and then snaps back up into place after the squeegee passes over. Working with acetate also requires this, because otherwise when you lift the screen off the acetate, the screen pulls up most of the ink that you have just applied.

The gocco site in Australia, http://nehoc.com.au has loads of information and I soon worked out what the problem was and set up a printing "station" as suggested. Below you can see the white foam core guide I've glued to some strawboard for the acetate and the blue non-slip mat to stop the screen from moving. I also used some double sided tape to hold the acetate down and stop it sticking to the screen.

Below is the screen in place over the acetate. You can see it is sitting about 5mm off the surface. I've taped a border of foam core around the frame to achieve this height.

Here you can see the ink I used and the gocco squeegee. I mixed the brown using my new Akua Kolor inks and the Akua intaglio transparent base to achieve the desired consistency. I decided to use this ink because it is non-toxic and clears up in water, but stays open for ages and wouldn't clog the screen. I was really happy with the way it printed, and if this project had been on paper, there would have been no problems.

I finished about half the print run on Friday and was feeling pretty pleased with the result. Then I re-read the Akua ink user guide and saw this:

"Akua Intaglio ink does not contain dryers. These inks dry by absorption unlike other inks which dry by evaporation....Glossy or coated papers are not recommended for use with this ink."

So now I am concerned that these pages may never dry!! Certainly they haven't had much hope these past 3 days with the rain pouring down and the humidity through the roof. Ah well, I guess I can consider it printing practice. If anyone has any suggestions or knows whether these prints will dry, please drop me a line.

Postscript Wed March 10th

Thought I should add that I emailed Susan Rostrow who developed the Akua inks to see what she thought about using the inks on acetate. She answered very quickly and confirmed my fears. She offered a few suggestions and I thought I would share them with you. I've cut and pasted her thoughts below:

Akua inks are formulated not to dry on plastic so printmakers have endless time for creating the image on the plate. I don't think a fixative would actually dry the inks. I have 3 suggestions:

1. You could try several coats of an acrylic spray. It would form a skin on top of the ink. You would still need to handle the print on acetate very carefully.
2. Apply a light sprinkle of baby powder or corn starch to dry the ink on the acetate. However, the white powder would sit on top of the ink and change the color. You would still need to handle the print on acetate very carefully.
3. Sandwich another acetate sheet on the side where the ink lies. This would offer protection from rubbing off.

The "sandwich" works well, but I'm still deciding between this and re-doing the print with some other inks, seeing this is to go in an artists book and will therefore be handled. I should finish this post by saying that the Akua worked beautifully with the gocco screen, and if you are printing on paper, it's an excellent non-toxic choice.

And the mystery item is....

.... an etching press. Carol and Sara did very well with their guesses - you know me well!

At the moment it has a bit of superficial rust from living out in a shed, but it was reconditioned a few years ago and is very solid. All the moving parts operate smoothly and easily, so it's really just in need of a cosmetic clean-up, some oil and grease for lubrication and some new felts and it will be ready to go! So far I've spent just over $400 including transport and I can't believe my luck! I've had an eye out for more than a year and this is the only one that I've seen on offer that wasn't $2000+

By the way, if anyone out there has any advice about caring for this little beauty, I'm all ears.

New Inks!

Very excited by the arrival yesterday of my new Akua water-based inks all the way from Dick Blick in the US. Everybody seems to rave about them and I can't wait to try them out. I guess this indicates a significant step for me towards committing to printmaking.

A Productive Afternoon, But At A Price

Last Friday I booked another afternoon at Impress studio to make some prints from my solarplates. Above you can see the fruits of my labour. I don't know how this rates for productivity - but I can tell you, some thing's got to give. I haven't been as tired as I was after that session in a long time. Not good. The next day I paid with a headache and I am still not fully recovered.

The etching press I used wasn't the new whizz-bang one. Since it is enormous and new (read very expensive) and I am inexperienced with presses, I decided to use a smaller one. This operates via a handle which turns numerous wheels. In order to achieve the embossed effect I was after, the pressure required is tremendous, and the physical effort too! Maybe someone used to printmaking can tell me: is a press with a fly wheel less physically demanding to operate? I know there are geared presses available, but they are AU$4000+. Maybe it will be back to the pasta machine after all!

Anyway, back to the prints. There are 4 in the series at this stage, but I'm not happy with the composition of the fourth one, so it may be dropped. My original plan for these plates is to use them in series to create a variable edition, which will be folded to form a small concertina book. I wasn't sure how the plates would look together - whether they should be spaced out or flush with one another, and I won't make a final decision until these ones are folded.

There is another layer of imagery to be added, figures, as I alluded in an earlier post. I've been testing out a couple of ways of adding the figures but I can't photograph my results very effectively and there's a problem with the scanner, so you'll just have to be patient, I'm afraid.

Monoprinting skies

Writing about your work is such a valuable tool. I wonder whether most of us use it often enough? I am sure that I don't. Writing my last post really helped me to clarify in my own mind what I was doing (obvious really, if I am going to explain it to you!) and this helped me see where I was getting caught up.

I've been a little too anxious to use the solarplate technique for everything, just because I wanted to use it. It's far better to look at the creative problem that you have and then decide the best possible methodology that you have at your disposal, and this definitely includes the media. This was always clear to me with ceramics, which was my first media. It's simply not good enough to say you are making such-and-such from clay, because that is what you do. The choice you make is so much more important to the work than that.

So, I realized there were other, more effective ways to depict the sky in the way that I am looking for, and I have started to test them out. Monoprinting is a very free way of working that really appeals to me, despite the fact that I don't have a background in painting, as many monoprinters do.



I used the new Golden Open acrylics on paper and perspex for these. Some of the perspex ones have added acrylic and drawing. Some of these look more like water than the sky, but that's all right. They were great fun to make, and lead me in a variety of directions, as well as coming much closer to solving my original problem.

Solarplate advice: Start Simple

I’ve been fuddling about in the studio lately, and don’t really have anything much to show for it. I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time on art, but it has all been very experimental and not really terribly successful. Of course they do say that you only learn from mistakes, and I guess that means that I am slowly working out what not to do! That said, it doesn’t leave me very motivated to post about my “discoveries”, as I suspect they are the type of discoveries that a beginner needs to make, but that seem pretty obvious unless you are in the position of trying these things out for the very first time.

You might remember from this post that I was quite hopeful about the potential of these images. The de-bossed figure really appealed to me, and is something that could work nicely both on paper and on porcelain. So since then I’ve been working on the imagery in Photoshop, and then testing it by exposing small strips of solar plate and printing them.

I’ve run up against my usual problem which is being overly ambitious before I've developed the technical skills and know-how required. In the test above, the de-bossing is achieved by making a relief plate and running it through an etching press. This is a step beyond making an ordinary relief print, and I managed to confuse myself for a while, although I did eventually work out what was happening.

In addition, I think I was trying to get too much happening at once, with not enough general printmaking experience and very little solarplate experience. This makes it difficult for me to visualize exactly how things on a plate will appear when printed. Below is the image I 've been working on, hoping to achieve the clouds popping out from the page, the figure de-bossed into the page and the sky floating somewhere in between these two.

To achieve this type of tonal range you need to use a double exposure, which I had learnt at the workshop I wrote about before. First, you expose an aquatint screen, followed by the image. I am exposing using sunlight, but even in winter here we reach a UV level of 4 most days, so there hasn't been any problem with UV intensity. I tested 3 different exposures before I was satisfied that I had developed sufficient detail.

And below is the result:

Left: printed with Charbonnel soft black etching ink

Right: printed with block ink made from Georgian block printing medium and alkyd paint

You can imagine that this is not the effect I am after, as it is pretty muddy and uninspiring. However, I think the test plate has been successfully exposed, the result just doesn't look how I had visualized it would. This comes from my general lack of printmaking experience, I believe. I think I will achieve a result more to my liking by separating the backgound (sky) from the foreground (figure and clouds). So it's back to the drawing board and I'll be putting up a sign to remind myself of my new motto: Start Simple! And if any printmakers are reading this, please feel free to comment!

Testing the limitations of the pasta machine as etching press

Despite spending most of this week trying to recover from the stress of the past few weeks, I did manage one afternoon in the studio.

Following on from last week's post about solarplate etching, I decided to run the test plates from the workshop through my pasta machine press. To anyone who has missed earlier posts where I've mentioned this little beauty, it is exactly what it says - a pasta making machine which I use for intaglio printmaking. I learned about this in an online printmaking course I took a couple of years ago.

To pass the test plates, which are only small strips approx 10cm x 3cm through the press, I decided to place the plate on some perspex. The dampened paper goes does next and then I experimented with the "felts". For the pasta press I use half sheets of the felt that you buy from craft shops. Depending on type of plate you are using and therefore how thick it is, I have used up to 3 layers of felt to give the desired pressure. In this case, with the perspex backing sheet, 1 layer of felt was all that would fit through between the rollers. And the results are below:



I have to confess that the umber speckles on the person are old sepia ink from the workshop that I hadn't cleaned off properly. They make the clouds look more like land masses I think, and could be useful in certain circumstances. I am pretty happy with how these tests turned out, and plan to continue developing this imagery. I think the pasta press has shown that it is definitely up to doing test runs, and if the imagery is not as finely detailed as the clouds on the left, it can even be used for the final print, especially where embossing is a feature.



Next I thought I would try my zinc etching plate through the pasta press, just to see how that worked. Almost straight away I discovered a problem:

Photo: kschmic, photobucket

Unless your plate is shorter than the distance from the rollers to the base plate, it needs to be flexible, so you can pull it forward as you wind the plate through. Previously I've used perspex, mylar and mat board for the plate, so flexibility has never been an issue, but with the zinc plate being 20cm long and obviously inflexible, it couldn't pass through the press. Oh well! maybe I'm the only person crazy enough to think of putting a zinc plate through a pasta machine anyway!

I do have a couple of prints of the etching I did on zinc to show you. It's not completely finished but the term of classes I was doing at Studio West End has come to an end, so this is as far as I can take the etching for now. I apologize for the quality of the images, but the prints are a bit large for my scanner so I have photographed them, and it's getting a bit dark.

This first attempt (below) is just the line etch with plate tone in sepia. I quite liked it, but I thought more atmosphere could be created by working with the light.

For this version (below), we added a number of aquatints, progressively darkening the plate. I think we've maybe gone a bit far, but it is possible to burnish back some areas to lighten them. I was about to try this when I discovered the pasta press couldn't be used to print the result.

Soon I will have access to an etching press through the community printmaking studio Impress Printmakers, so I'll be able to keep working on this plate then.









'

Solar-powered techniques Part 2: Solarplate printmaking

Thank-you to everyone who has written to me with best wishes for my mother. After 8 days in hospital she is glad to be home. I was able to clear out most other commitments and made it as easy for myself as I could, so that I could be there for her as much as possible. I am pretty tired out now and am trying to take it easy in order to recover. I hope that you will understand if I don't respond to your kind messages personally.


In April I finally made it to a second workshop at Impress Printmakers Studio. My first one was in 2006 and was my introduction to artists books. This recent workshop was on Solarplate Printmaking.

Solar plates are a method of exposing plates either for relief or intaglio printmaking. It's another low toxicity technique that looks pretty simple and that I have been aching to try for about 3 years. Luckily, I purchased the "bible" on the technique around that time, as it is out of print and as time passes, the price is rising in a rather unbelievable fashion. Dan Welden took solar plates from their commercial application and experimented with their use in fine art settings. He wrote the book with an Australian scientist and artist, Pauling Muir and gave it the rather lyrical title "Printmaking in the Sun". I believe that a second edition is currently being written.

The book is amazing. It is wonderfully thorough but if anything, the talk of exposure times and test strips made me feel that I really needed to attend a workshop before I could give this technique a try. Once we went through it at the workshop, I realized that the basic technique is simple, although each print you make will be different and a certain amount of testing and "tweaking" is necessary to get the result you want.

The basic process is:

• prepare your artwork on e.g. wet media acetate, OHT, drafting film (intaglio images are not reversed while relief ones are)
• place your art and the plate in a contact frame and expose to UV light (the sun or a lamp/light box will harden the polymer in the areas it reaches)
  
• remove and rinse in water, using a soft brush to remove areas that have not hardened (i.e parts of the image where the UV could not pass through to the plate)
• print!

Personally, my greatest interest is in finding a way to make intaglio prints. I don't really like the idea of working with the acid and other materials necessary for traditional etchings. It seems very daunting. Recently Wim de Vos at Studio West End took me through the hard ground process, together with aquatinting and that has dispelled some of the mystery around the whole thing, but I still feel it could take me years to produce anything I find truly satisfying. I like the idea of working away here at home with solar plates; plus they provide the option of using my photographs as a starting point, which is very appealing to me.

The major drawback I can see with solar plates is cost. The plates themselves are not cheap: $14 for a 15 x 21cm plate against $7.90 for 12.5 x 20cm zinc plate. And while there are no other chemicals to buy for the process, it is quite possible to ruin a plate with the wrong exposure (once you've rinsed the plate, you can't re-expose if you aren't happy with the result). I guess this is where real discipline needs to be exercised to ensure you test your exposure and print your test plates, and keep testing until you have the result you are looking for. That way you are only wasting small pieces of plate, rather than a full plate. According to Dan Welden, it is possible to re-work plates by scratching into them with etching and drypoint tools, but I can imagine this wouldn't always give the result you were seeking.

Well, I suppose you might like to see some results from the day for yourselves. I'm not too sure how impressive they will look online, but they will give you some idea. I plan to re-print them using the old "pasta machine press" to see how the plates respond.

This first test (below) is an intaglio print made with some of my cloud imagery. This was originally part of this photo.

This silhouette (below) comes from the cover of "Resistance" (which by the way I hope to return to soon, now that the weather is cooler). They were both printed in both relief and intaglio. The lovely thing about them is the debossing, which you can't really pick up in these pictures.

Celtic Binding

The past fortnight has been really busy and tiring for me. As well as my weekly class at Studio West End (SWE) I went to a full day workshop on folded books. I am learning a lot and looking forward to having more time to play with this new knowledge and integrate it into my work.

Last week at SWE I learnt how to do celtic binding. My family's ancestral roots are in the south of Ireland at Maynooth and so the idea of doing celtic binding is very appealing to me. There is a traditional form which Keith Smith teaches, and my teacher Adele Outterridge has modified and extended this. So far I have made two books with celtic bindings, but it is so pretty I am sure I will make many more.

As soon as I tried to set up to take some photos of the books for the blog, Claude had to help!

But eventually I managed to move him far enough away to focus on the bindings....

Above: This is my first attempt, using Adele's modification. I think the
paper on the covers is Japanese - I bought it ages ago.

Above: this one is just made with printer paper and some coloured art paper I had lieing around, although the thread is the proper waxed linen (this helps the sewing to sit nicely). This is two of the celtic cross-overs (Keith Smith style) joined by 3 coptic stitches in the centre. This is a variant of a variant developed by Adele!

You might remember that a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned I was going to try etching. Well, that is progressing slowly but surely...I've made it as far as the first etch of the plate and this week I will ink it up and see how it looks. In the mean time I thought you might like a look at the plate...

I have to confess I find the fine detail on the plate quite intoxicating.