I promised you a cat bottom, so here it is! This one was taken from the very first post of my cat-of-the-day sketchbook blog: http://catoftheday.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/3/. It’s another mezzotint of course, printed from aluminium. The print is only 8cm square by the way, but if you want to see it quite close up, just click on the image. Here is the original sketch (below). Arthur is not really that stripy, but it was a starting point: And below – a few of the stages of making the plate:
I went back to the plate in my post ‘Mezzotint done improperly‘, and burnished a few features into my Spiky Cat. Now he looks like this: I also added a little more detail with the mezzotint rocker (before burnishing). He used to look like this: I think it’s an interesting effect, but I wonder if the approach has a wider application or whether it is mostly suitable for drawing cats like this? It would be interesting to find out sometime. Below is a photo of the printing plate as it now looks:
I am not sure if I had intended to do a series of mezzotint cats, but that is what seems to be happening! Besides, they are a useful subject and size to be practising with a technique that is fairly new to me, so here is my latest. This is not a drawing sketched from life but owners of cats will instantly recognize this behaviour as classic catishness. Below is the initial sketch on the aluminium plate, all the rest of the detail was made up as I went along. For more on the mezzotint process, have a look at…
Printing ‘The Spiky Cat’… I promised this post was coming! While I was making the printing plate in the previous post it occurred to me that the mezzotint rocker – the tool that is used to put the texture on the plate first, produces a rather interesting line which might be reminiscent of the spiky hairiness of cats just on its own. The individual lines made by this tool aren’t usually seen in the final print – the idea is to ‘rock’ all over the plate in 8 different directions until you have an even texture of burrs and pock-marks,…
‘Stripy Cat, Washing’ I do not claim in any way to be an expert in mezzotint, the title of this post is to contrast with the post coming next, which will be ‘Mezzotint done improperly’. I have two new prints to show you which I did very differently from each other, however you will have to wait for the ‘improper’ one. This is a print inspired by the many cat drawings I have been posting on my other blog, Cat-of-the-day. A few months ago I posted a series of photos of the last mezzotint print I made – ‘Percy Cat’….
I had another play with the mezzotint rocker yesterday, with a proper sketch first and everything. I took some photos as I went along, but I’m not going to explain the ‘rocking’ process in much detail as you can see that on this post of a few weeks ago. A cross-over has occurred between my two blogs – the drawing that this mezzotint is based on is one of my cat-of-the-day sketches. The printing plate is aluminium and is cut to the same size as the prints I have made into coasters. For a while I have thought that the…
I had a search going on Ebay for a Mezzotint Rocker. The search has probably been running for a couple of years and I think only once or twice did it turn up this rather obscure printmaking tool and at full price, which is not cheap. So when one appeared at half price last week, I could not resist… This post is mainly a series of photos of my experiments with mezzotint on a piece of aluminium (copper being the traditional material for this printing technique). If you would like to know more about how mezzotint – a slightly obscure…
…sorry for the alliteration, but the title describes just what I’ve been up to: continuing the making of some very small mezzotint prints. All the mezzotint plates and prints I have so far shown you measure 5×6 cm, or 2 x 2 1/4 inches. Small, and therefore fairly quick to make, though the whole process is still undoubtedly hard work on the hands! And so I am getting used to this technique before I embark on something more ambitious… and gather together some pennies to afford a large ‘pre-rocked’ copper plate – which costs many times more than the plain…
continued from previous post: https://nancyfarmer.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/a-first-attempt-at-mezzotint-part-2/ …and finally! After more burnishing the plate of Medusa makes an image like this: (click on the image and you can see a lot more detail) …at least, it does when I get it right. As I mentioned before not only the making of the plate can be tricky, the inking-up is a disaster-prone process too. Too much ink wiped off and this happens: …which is really annoying. Especially as it takes a while to do each time, and the plate is wearing out a little bit each time, too. I may be finding there…
(continued from: https://nancyfarmer.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/a-first-attempt-at-mezzotint/ ) …so, yesterday was the moment of truth, or at least, one moment of truth. The image on the little copper plate on which I’ve been working may look very nice, but the important thing is what will it look like as a print? As I explained, the image is created by starting with a roughened surface and burnishing areas of it smooth, or partially smooth, with steel tools. What will be the lighter areas (in the final print) are shiny areas on the copper plate against the matt areas of the background. Now it’s time to…
Art by Nancy Farmer 