dreadful week...

 This week has been pretty rough. It's just one of those weeks where nothing works out. Where you work you butt off and you find yourself back at step one. Yeah, so I start my second plate for my BFA and low and behold, I completely ruin it! What a disaster! So I started over after debating on whether I should stick with the awful soft ground technique, try the monoprint transfer drawing, or do hard ground and not get the line quality I want. Difficult, yes. BUT I stuck to hard ground because I couldn't afford to waste anymore time on soft ground. By the way, just a note, don't ever attempt doing a soft ground on a giant plate. Not a good idea. So here's what I have so far...

This is yummy yummy soft ground. I put the plate onto the hot plate, yup that giant rectangle thing that heats up super hot! The soft ground is melted onto the plate. 

I then roll out the soft ground and try to get it as even as possible.

It should look like so, but this is a little too much. Yup, it's hard to get it covered evenly and covered with just the right amount of soft ground.

I told you this stuff was yummy. It smells AMAZING!

Once the soft ground cools, I transfer my image onto my plate. This is were soft ground gets its name. Unlike hard ground, when soft ground cools it is still malleable. So any pressure applied to the surface will etch; thumb prints, scratch marks, etc. So in order to transfer my image, I need to be very careful and "draw" with my hand and arm up. For this piece, I am using the end of a paint brush and using the paper to give a charcoal like line. This was very hard to do since I want very gestural lines. I probably had to redo this five times and then decided that soft ground wasn't going to work for this piece. Disappointment.

This is the new plate. Hard ground, you sure are a dream! So much easier to work with! So far it's going well. It's all etched and ready to do a test print! If the plate is in the clear and it's time to do spit bit! Another technique that will be my first! Stay tuned peeps!