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 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…
Art by Nancy Farmer 