December 1, 2018

Drawn in the Argos Gallery of Santa Fe:

I am making another attempt do do a BIG soft ground etching, while drawing from a live model.

At the end of the 3 hour modeling session, I peeled the newsprint paper off the wet copper plate, and
the reverse image was dirty and blurry. Perhaps the BIG grounds were too wet, as I had brayered them on the previous day, directly onto the plate. I did this for the previous soft ground experiment, and also got a muddy looking newsprint ghost image on the back of the paper.

Note that the BIG ground was so sticky that when I laid the newsprint on it to draw, it stuck, and would not pull off easily.

Muddy reverse drawing image

on the back of the newsprint paper

Ugly plate, 

but perhaps it will etch well

For earlier BIG soft ground experiments, I brayed the wet BIG grounds onto a newsprint paper first, and then transferred the BIG grounds to the copper plate, by placing that newsprint paper onto the copper plate, wet side down, and brayering again.  Maybe this makes for a thinner coat of BIG grounds -- which might be less wet, and work better.

M Tobias Hall drew with us.



UPDATE (Dec 14):

I etched the plate in ferric chloride for an hour at Remarque Print Workshop in Albuquerque, but the results do not look promising.  After 20 and 30 minutes there didn't seem visually to be much of an etch.  Since the etch did not look promising, I did not bother to proof it.

The plate was "dry" after 2 weeks (even though we have cold weather), not sticky to the touch.  The BIG ground was strong enough not to flake off.

Plate after 1 hour etch

at Remarque

Also, on a side note, Kimberly's soft ground etch did not work either.   She used the soft ground method in the New Grounds manual, but the grounds were flaking off.  Since she started this project about the same time that I did, the ink/grounds had plenty of time to dry.