Develop your Drawing 5; Printmaking 6

This week on drawing course at city Lit  we were exploring properties of pencil: the different marks of  2H, HB, 4B  during the warm-up observing the outlines and shapes of a tangled heap of tools borrowed from the sculpture room.

Then we chose 1 item to do a large  close-up on a A1 sheet after filling the whole sheet with a mid tone. Despite using several  2B pencils in each hand  it still took a lot of time and effort - I was so ready for my coffee and Portuguese custard tart ! The coffee holder was just what I needed to prop up the wrench - the photo is deliberately blurred  by the way.

Later in the print class, I traced a section of  the mudflat photo I've also been using as inspiration for my collagraphs , then turning it over and using carbon paper, transferred the  main lines  onto the hard ground  plate I prepared last week.

Then I worked into  it a bit  inscribing the wax with a biro,  trying not to do too much as will be using the same plate for aquatint and possibly soft ground

Then 4 minutes in acid! Picked up some additional unwanted marks somewhere along the way ( the wax layer was very thin), I'll just have to incorporate them somehow into the design. No time to make a proof , that will be the first task next week.

Very difficult to take photos of such shiny images but I wanted to record the stages for my sketchbook.