Finally some studio time again

After a long time I finally spend another day in the studio. Naturally I spent a lot of time figuring out what are the loose ends that I want to pick up next. A lot of projects are left half finished with the intention to just do this or that to have them finally done. I looked through these still “open files”, closed some because I lost interest in them, and then started fresh. While rummaging in my studio I found some dried up leaves that were still left over from my eco-printing session last autumn. While I couldn’t find time in my studio I had an interesting discussion with Judith Hoffman (see discussion here and her homepage here) about leaf prints, and so couldn’t resist playing around with them once more.

There were a couple more but I like these results best.

It has been almost 3 years now that I bought some drypoint etching equipment and only unsuccessfully tried some once. Since then I did some reading and feel confident enough for a second go now. I hope I’ll be able to get some nice prints from this plate, showing a fish I drew while in hospital (a did a fair amount of them back then)

When I had finished the plate it was already getting kind of late, and so I didn’t want to start printing (and risk toxic paint on the hands of the little ones). Therefore I decided to prepare for some more printing on the upcoming weekend:

These are not the sketches from which I will print, some more work will have to be done here. The general plan is to do a reduction print with two printing blocks. These first sketches are based on a photo by Andrew Holzschuh who thankfully released it under a creative common license – thank you!

Now I just hope that the weekend goes as planned and I indeed get some time for printing, doing some more sketching and cutting lino.