The Knickers, revealed!

The Witches’ Knickers picture is finished! For a few more finished images see this entry in my finished paintings: https://nancyfarmergallery.wordpress.com/2015/05/25/maiden-flight/ . Here is more work-in-progress, carrying on from the photos where I had begun to paint the witches in a blue monochrome (Prussian blue watercolour or gouache – a dark but very transparent colour) I’ve done several paintings entirely in a monochrome (light and dark shades of a single colour) of Prussian blue lately, but for this painting of course I had to have colour – the knickers MUST be in colour or the painting won’t really work as the idea…

Stripy cat bottom!

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:  

Memento Mori

Not-so-cute cats (mostly). Do not fear, there are no dead cats in this post, but perhaps rat-owners might be advised to look away and to skip this one. Continuing with my little series of cat mezzotint prints, I felt it was important that I didn’t end up with a series entirely comprising nice cute cat pictures. Cats are lovely, but lets have the Compleat Cat. Therefore, I thought at the very least there should be the classic cat-washing-bum pose, and at lease one dead rat. We have chickens and where they live has become so badly undermined with rats we…

The ‘Spiky Cat’ revisited

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:

Cat-in-the-Box: another mezzotint

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…

Mezzotint done improperly

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,…

The Master Plan

from 12 Views of the Tor: 2015 calendar What more can I add? This is the Master Plan: the title pretty much sums it up. There is an arch villain, an arch villain’s cat, an evil checklist…. and no James Bond to be seen. It’s obviously all going to work without a hitch… For those interested in the technicalities, this is another print entirely in drypoint, starting off with sandpapering the aluminium plate with very coarse sandpaper, then burnishing the surface where I didn’t want the background scratches. Then the trusty pointy tool drew the rest. There is an obvious…