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:
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…
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,…
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…
Despite building emergencies and Christmas fairs, work has progressed on the etchings for the Medusa Calendar (for 2014). But I have been so busy with stuff I have not had time to post about stuff, so here is the next etching, printed yesterday… for October, of course: Quite pleased that this is both scary and jolly at the same time! On the technical side, if you are interested, the foreground stuff is created by etching the plate heavily and burnishing the highlights back in, in the manner of a Mezzotint print (except the actual white of the faces – that’s metal…
Apologies for temporarily abandoning the blog; it has not been for want of anything to say, but for want of time to say it in. So this will be a quick round-up of some of the stuff I have been up to in the last week-and-a-half. First, I have been hard at work on a commission. I don’t do these very often, partly because people usually only ask me for a commission if they want to be depicted as a fairy or demon or some such (for a few commissioned ‘portraits’ in the past have a look at: http://www.nancyfarmer.net/gal_commissions.html ),…
…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…
Art by Nancy Farmer 