See that black hair? That’s really just a combination of about 543,000 lines.

This quarter I have revamped a lot of my old work, because there are a ton of old ideas I like but which are a bit outdated technique-wise. So I decided to use my ancient drawing of a sphinx “self-portrait” for my printmaking class. This time we did dry point intaglio, which was great for convincing me I do not want to ever be a printmaker.

First we ruined our wrists carving line after line into a sheet of Plexiglas, then we slathered the whole thing with ink, mashed it in for about 10 minutes, and spent 20 minutes rubbing all the ink off that we just mashed in. Then we took a sheet of paper which had been soaking for the last day, and pressed the ink onto it using a buttload of pressure. This doesn’t sound too bad, but doing it 12 times gets rather time-consuming. Then there is the joy you feel after pulling a print and realizing you didn’t rub quite enough ink off on one corner, making the whole thing worthless as they are supposed to be exactly the same.

In the end though I really love how my sphinx came out. Though it was freaking hard to print, it was a lot faster than hand-drawing 12 of the same image! And now I can give all the rejected prints to family and friends as Christmas presents. Oh joy.

Related posts:

• Painting over Printed Lineart – A Test

Tags: greek, Illustration, intaglio, printmaking, Process, sphinx

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Illustration, School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.