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By Fine Art: By Belinda Del Pesco
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Collagraph: Mermaid with a Pirate Scope

Friday, October 18, 2013 13:06

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Mermaid with a Pirate Scope 6.5×4.25 Collagraph with metallic pigment, ink & watercolor

Available in my Etsy Shop (an open edition, with variation between each hand pulled print)

See the process shots below….

If you’d like to see more process shots on making collagraphs, search this blog for “collagraph”, and see previous posts like this one, this one and this one. #makesomething

Origins of this art: It started with a doodle in my day planner (on the left)
after chatting on the phone with my step dad about a book
he sent me called Tinkerbelle, written by Robert Manry about
his experience sailing a tiny, open13.5 foot boat alone across the Atlantic
in 1965. (It took him 78 days. He hallucinated a lot from sleep deprivation,
and I wondered if he saw mermaids.)

Building a collagraph like this starts with a piece of scrap matboard,
with a drawing on the reverse side, coated front and back
with Liquitex Gloss Medium & Varnish.

After sealing my drawing with the liquitex, I added texture with
shapes punched from newsprint and adhered with more varnish (nice & thin).
I hammered an awl into the matboard to create those teeny dots to hold ink.

Using an exacto-knife, I carved my line work out of the top layer of the matboard,
adjusting width where I wanted linear grooves & troughs to hold ink.
When I was satisfied with the carving, and additional textures, I sealed the whole plate
font, back and edges again with Liquitex Gloss & Varnish.
The medium makes the plate feel like plastic; its nice and sturdy for inking,
wiping and rolling through the press.

Using the a la poupee method, with Akua Intaglio Inks, I applied pigments to the plate
in sections, pushing ink into the grooves and textures I built on the plate.

After wiping the plate with newsprint, I added a little more pigment to the plate
around her scales and hair with a bristle brush, but when I printed, the inks were a bit
splotchy, so I tried again, without adding more ink (below).

On this proof, I added Akua Intaglio metallic gold ink mixed with a bit
of green to her fish scales, but the trip through the etching press squished the metal flakes
against the plate and never adhered to the paper, so I have more experimenting to do.
I’m in touch with the good folks at Akua and they’ve made a few suggestions.

To save the step of re-applying ink to her hair after wiping the plate,
I added 120 grit carborundum (sand paper grit) mixed with medium. This will act like
thousands of little teeth to hold ink, resulting in rich darks.

Even after wiping the plate, the texture of the carborundum held enough
ink to print a nice, rich dark. I love this stuff.
It chews up your tarlatan cloth, but it does the trick.

I’ve printed just three from the plate so far (an open edition), but I want to experiment
with release agent under metallic ink before pulling more prints. In the meantime,
on the print at the top of this post, I added metallic powder with gouache binder to
her scales & hair, with a brush, so she’s got some nice shimmer now.

I love a good work-around.

Mermaid with a Pirate Scope (collagraph)

You can click the Craftsy logo at the top of my blog
on the left, or click here to vote.

Art Quote

There is nothing so discouraging as a bad composition at the very start. Do most of your “changing” in composition before you begin to paint, for at the beginning, when you are fresh, it is easy to change a composition. It is just “blocked in” and there it nothing to “spoil” yet.

~John E. Carlson

Belinda Del Pesco Fine Art Blog

Source: http://belindadelpesco.blogspot.com/2013/10/collagraph-mermaid-with-pirate-scope.html

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