We had an interesting and informative workshop this week hosted by Rebecca on the techniques of etching. having no experience of the process I was really interested to learn how to do it!
I soon realised once Rebecca started talking us through the process, there is a lot of time and patience involved, however I can imagine it being a quiet relaxing and almost meditative process once you got into it. Considering we only had 3 hours I would say we did well to understand the basics, although it was a shame we couldn’t get further, there I have to learn to be more patient I suppose!
So… We brought our hard waxed plates home to work on, kindly, Val gave me her plate as she didn’t intend to take it further. I wanted to do an image of my head to use in this semesters work, just to try the process and hopefully get something I can use in my assessment. As I had two plates I decided to go “off piste” so to speak and use the second one for purely decorative effect and to have a little experiment! I found an image which was in my photo’s of a detail of my garden railings and used this to make a sketch into the wax… I decided to use a more painterly effect by applying some turps to the wax and letting the wax melt a little freely, anyway it will be interesting to see how they both turn out. The next question is when am I going to get time to develop them to the next stage? Its the Easter break next week, so it will have to be after that…
