Three Old Men

So this is week #7 of my 8 week collagraph class.  Here's one way to get lines.....I did these sketches on a file folder, and then cut them out piece by piece, and glued them down on my "plate" (ie, piece of cardboard), a little bit farther apart than they were cut.

I like the crispness of the edges.

I was also playing around with different colored inks, but I think I'll print this again just black.

Rust drawings

This was "art-weekend"--eight women in a cabin on the lake, with nothing to do but eat good food, drink wine, and make art.  One of the projects was "rusting".  Most of the others were doing it on fabric, but since I'm much more of a paper person, I gave it a shot on watercolor paper.  It worked really fast, with steel wool, and vinegar and water mixed together in a spray bottle.  It wasn't really this red, but that's how my scanner scanned it.  Then I used pen and ink, making the images that were suggested in the rust.  The top one I like, the bottom one I don't (I did for awhile, but then made too many marks).

It's a pretty cool process, one I can see applying to a picture AFTER doing some kind of initial drawing, so that one can make the rusting happen in the places that you desire it.

Falling

Joy is black India ink and a dip pen.

I Hate Making Collagraphs!

They're good for textures--and textures can be really cool--but not so for lines.  So I'm really frustrated.  I'm taking a class, and there are two more sessions, but I haven't made hardly anything that I've liked at all.

The Dive

I'm just not that into these collagraphs.  I printed four of them yesterday, and this is the only one that I liked.  But again, I learned something--this time that if you want ALL of your details to show up, your plate needs to be pretty much the same thickness.  When you have a part that's much thicker than the rest, you lose the details in other places.  I'm not even going to post those....

Whistling in the Dark

The topic is from my Artists Before Noon group.  It's the first prompt I've done in a long time.  My original conception was for a pen-and-ink drawing (which I still may do), but since I'm taking a collagraph class, I thought I'd try to do it with collagraphs.  It's not really working out all that great, but these two are better than the previous two.    I didn't print them yesterday, because the glue in all the lines was still drying.

But I did learn some things today:  You can't make a hard edge with carborundum.  Also, you need to make the areas where you are going to wipe off all/most of the ink (i.e., white areas) higher than the carborundum areas, not lower.  

Fair enough.  And I'm BEGINNING to see what I might be able to do with this medium.

What to do with disappointing prints?

So....what do YOU do with a print that's disappointing?  The first thing I did was attack it with pen and ink to try to get some kind of definition.  Still didn't like it, and at that point, it hardly matters....because you don't care at all. Watercolors?  Sure.  Maybe I'll cut them up next....

It's really kind-of liberating not liking something at all.  If you like something, then you don't want to wreck it, but if you don't, then you might discover something you might not have otherwise.