Printing An Etching Plate

strip a

I’m getting better each day and I spent half a day at Swansea Print Workshop printing some of my etching plates. I used Intaglio Printmaker’s black etching ink (drypoint shopmix) and BFK Rives 250 gsm paper. I soaked it for about an hour and a half while I prepared some registration sheets and fixed them to the bed of the etching press, under a sheet of clear plastic. I got my workstation set up, with plenty of newspaper and some small sheets cut from Yellow Pages, washed scrim and set the hotplate to medium.

strip b

I put the steel photopolymer plate onto the hotplate to warm up and spread some ink across it with a small rubber squeegee, pressing it into the grooves. Then I rubbed it with a piece of soft, washed scrim in a circular motion until the excess ink had been removed and finally rubbed over areas I wanted to highlight with a cotton bud (Q Tip).

strip c

I cleaned my hands with vegetable oil then washed them and, using ‘paper fingers’, rtemoved a sheet of soaked paper from the tray and slapped it up against the white board. Then I squeegeed it to remove excess water, then put it between some sheets of blotting paper an rolled over the top to get damp, but not too wet. I put the inked-up plate onto the plastic sheet on the press bed, over it’s registration marks.

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I placed the damp paper, again with ‘paper fingers’ over the plate, using the second set of registration marks, put some clean tissue paper on top and put the swansdown blankets over the whole thing. Don’t worry, they’re not made from real swans. Then I turned the wheel and put the whole thing through the rollers.

strip e

Then I took the print, called ‘The Towel’, off the plate and put it to dry between sheets of acid-free tissue between two fibre boards for a couple of days. It’s one of a number of my pieces going into a new group exhibition in Fountain Fine Art gallery in Llandeilo, opening on Saturday 23rd February. If you’re in the area, please pop in 🙂

Reclining Pose

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Each day, the lurgi seems a bit weaker and I went to life drawing tonight, for the first time in a month! I only managed an hour but I did some quick pen and ink sketches, using a traditional dip pen and then I used chalky pastels and graphite block (6B) to draw this fabulous reclining pose. I love the challenge of foreshortening and this is a particular favourite model. This drawing has a lot of potential for development into a mixed media piece or a large monotype. I’m hoping to get back to the studio next week to get stuck into some serious art.

Puss ‘n’ Boots

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Still nursing the lurgi this morning so I was sat with my legs up on a footstool wearing my cool Magnum HiTec boots. Sparta Psychokitteh came along and stretched herself on top of my snazzy leggings. I’m a scribbler. So I scribbled her.

As I was drawing, I drifted off into ‘the zone’. This sort of repetitive, physical mark-making induces a kind of meditative state in me. I thought about the books I’d read and the documentaries I’d watched over the past few weeks while I’ve been ill, about paleolithic art and cave paintings in particular. Most of the art from the Stone Age is recognisably animal or human, but there are lots of examples of abstract shapes, grids, dots and dashes and a number of theories about them. One is that early artists were trying to depict entoptic imagery, another that they were drawing hallucinations caused by intoxicants or rituals. I wondered how many artists have been consulted in the formulation of these theories because when I’m in ‘the zone’ I get totally absorbed in the phusicality of drawing; the physical nature of making marks over and over again. Were the earliest artists in our species experiencing something similar? Hmmmmm.

Drawn into my A6 blue silk recycled sketchbook with a Pentel V5 pen, size 0.5mm and Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens sizes XS, S and B. (Sparta chewed the bead off the ribbon and I had to tie it back on and it’s skanky now!).

So very true LOL – little sketches of cats 🙂

Just A Quickie

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The lurgi is still with me but I managed a couple of hours pottering today, showing an old friend some of my work in exhibitions, then I went home and crashed. It’s very frustrating because I can’t get the energy to do any artwork when I’m in this state. So here’s one I did earlier :).

I was doing some direct line monotypes in the studio a while back and as I started to clean the ink off the perspex, I liked the smudgy marks, so I quickly scribbled a figure in the corner with a cotton bud (Q tip) and took the print (a reduction monotype) onto some acid-free tissue I had hanging about, very gently smoothing it with my hand. I’d always thought that you needed a press to take a reductive print, but it depends on the thickness of the paper. Using really thin tissue worked quite well, so I’ll do some more experimenting with it – when I finally get rid of this dreaded lurgi!!!!!

Glamping?!?!

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I heard a new word yesterday. ‘Glamping’. It means upmarket camping. You know, for the sort of (rich) person who goes to a Festival without their own tent because they’ve booked a luxury Yurt with inflatable beds and hand-stitched Mongolian throws, embroidered floor cushions and artisanal hookahs with an ensuite chemical toilet.

Pansies! I’m a veteran of festivals and biker rallies since the 1970’s and I laugh in the face of horizontal rain, cold, hard ground and festival toilets! What sort of Wuss would want to go in for Glamping! Well, Husb probably would. We went to the Green Man Festival a couple of years ago. It was his first festival and probably his last. He did not take to tent life, communal toilets and roughing it at all. The only saving grace was the gourmet food. Back in the day, we were grateful for a beer tent and some skanky burgers. Husb feasted on rotisserie chicken, hand raised game pies, couscous and green chai.

I wanted to draw a crowd scene, but how to go about it? I didn’t want to draw loads of little ovals so I lay down to get a low perspective and started with the head of the man in front of me, working my way down some key groups of people and decided to leave the viewer to fill in the gaps down to the stage. Jarvis Cocker headlined on the Saturday night. He was brilliant.

Helping The Monkey

10 monkey help

Greetings bald apes. Sparta the psycho-kitteh here. I’ve been helping the furless she-monkey tonight. She likes to make marks on paper with coloured dirt. I don’t know why. She could be doing something more useful, like licking me clean or hunting rats. I’d do much more interesting things if I had opposable thumbs. I’ll never understand the workings of the monkey mind.

Here she is playing with woody sticks and water. And here I am directing the whole thing. She wasn’t very grateful. Idiot.

SOLD! Whoohoo!

alan cefn drawing

Yesterday evening was the launch of the 15 Hundred Lives group show which features 14 of my monotypes and some of my sketchbooks. I was lucky enough to sell one. WOOHOO!!!! It’s called AlCefn and it’s a large monotype, about 50 x 80 cms which started out as a life drawing in chalk and charcoal onto brown wrapping paper. I made a tracing and reversed it onto a light box and, using a perspex sheet inked up in yellow oil pigment, I drew into it with cotton buds (Q Tips), rags, coctail sticks and hoghair brushes, put a sheet of BFK Rives 250 gsm paper on top and put it through the Radcliffe Press at Swansea Print Workshop, giving me a yellow print. Then I cleaned the persepx, coated it thinly in red pigment and repeated the drawing stage, overprinting the red plate onto the yellow print on paper. Finally I did the same with blue.

three plates

The overlay of the three colours gives a huge range of hues from a rich, velvety, warm black through all the primary, secondary and tertiaries to white. Magic!

alan cefn small

I’ll be running a one-day course in the technique later this month at Swansea Print Workshop, if anyone fancies learning how to do it. Either contact the print workshop by phone or email or get in touch with me. It’s a great technique for artists who draw. 🙂

 

The Old Rocker

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Feeling better day by day and went out for lunch with Husb to a local cafe, which does really nice home made food. I looked around for someone to scribble and saw this very elderly man, in his eighties, dining with some friends. His hair, although thin, was down almost to his shoulders and over his dapper striped shirt and tie was a rockin’ leather waistcoat. Cool.

Sparta the psycho-kitteh has been chewing the bead on the end of the ribbon page marker on my little sketchbook. As if catching rats wasn’t enough……….. 😡

The Hunter

27 sparta

Another dead rat in the hallway this evening and one very proud psycho-kitteh strutting around, well pleased with herself. We’ve had a spate of dead rats in recent weeks, some of them quite large and we found out last week where they’re coming from – our compost bin. Husb noticed that our kitchen waste was breaking down very quickly – too quickly! He poked around and found a network of tunnels through the compost. Rats have been burrowing in and scoffing our kitchen scraps…..and Sparta has been lying in wait and killing the rats. Well, that’s what our species domesticated the little furry ones for; protecting our homes and food from rodents.

14 my chair

Although I sometimes think that WE’RE the ones who’ve been domesticated! Husb has secured the bottom of the bin and there doesn’t seem to be any more rat action inside the compost, but this evening’s corpse shows that they’re still coming round to take a look. I’m amazed that she can drag a rat through two cat flaps, across a large kitchen and down a long corridor in her tiny little jaws. She’s a very small cat. The top image is a photopolymer plate etching of Sparta and the lower one, a drawing from one of my sketchbooks.