Good and Evil, in artistic imbalance

In fact, I am with William Blake on this one (if I had to pretend NOT to be an atheist for a moment) – Devils should not be seen as ‘evil’, they are the appropriate balancing creative and chaotic force, to counteract the order personified by God and the angels. But believe what you will: I don’t, I simply like drawing them. So here, finished, are all the Angel and Demon coasters that you have seen glimpses of for the past few weeks. They are unfairly balanced: 6 devils to 4 angels, and yes, the devils are proving more popular….

Temporarily changing sides…

I have two more sets of drypoint prints for coasters, but since it is approaching that time of year I have switched sides and let a couple of angels in. They are not, you will find, much better behaved, but they have a taste for Champagne, which makes them feel they are superior to the devils. The Devil coasters appeared in a couple of my recent previous posts. There is around a dozen of each design, and they will all be £9 each (angels and devils) when I ultimately get around to selling them. If anyone is interested, send me…

Three Drinking Nudes, printed

Yesterday was a complete marathon of a printing session. With drypoint (see previous post), the ink is held only by the burr raised by scratching the metal, and it is easily damaged and flattened and the prints get progressively paler. I am told the best thing is simply to print all you can in one day, without stopping, to get the most from the plate…. So, 12 prints from each of three plates, which was asking a bit much for one day’s printing, but by the end of the day I had got it down to a fairly fine and…

Drypoint Nudes

With a bit of luck I will print these tomorrow. These are the drypoint plates that I mentioned in the last post, the prints from these are (I hope) destined to become some nice little coasters, featuring drinking nudes. But at this point I have no idea how well my plates are going to print… oh what fun is printing 😉 The photo above shows one of the aluminium plates, and the tip of the pointy tool wot done it. Below you can see better what I am using. This is not designed for this purpose, it’s a leftover from…

Coasting along…

I have only 2 more sessions of etching to go before the summer, and then no printing or etching till October, so I need a quick project. Here are a little series of nudes with drinks, destined to become drypoint prints, which I will then put in coasters, in the manner of the ‘Stain Devil’ coasters which I have more-or-less run out of for the moment: And below – the sketches on the aluminium plates. Of course it now occurs to me, having sketched directly on the plates (because it seemed easier than messing about with tracing paper) that I…