Prayerful

Prayerful
Charcoal on newsprint

Prayerful. That’s probably not the word most would use to describe the ambience at the Tuesday Night Drawing services. But we are thankful for such great models and for the artistic fellowship of the Tuesday night congregation. And we’re grateful that Argos Chapel — I mean Gallery — provides an inspirational venue for artists whose souls thirst for drawing (and etching) fulfillment and artistic meaning.

Nothing else to say, I guess, other than “Amen.”

Stack of Pillows

Stack of Pillows
Charcoal on newsprint

One of the charcoal sketches from last Tuesday night’s life drawing group. I’m go to the Etching Studio tonight and tomorrow so I can make an etching of this drawing. 

Etching Better

Just Posing Again
Etching

Now I’ve progressed or regressed into a process of drawing a life model in charcoal, using the drawing to create a traditional etching, then scanning the etching to manipulate it in Photoshop. Very cool (I think) because I end up with an etching and the possibility of virtually unlimited variations for digital prints. Fun stuff.

Etching Bad

Crash and Burn
Etching
6" x 5"

As I mentioned before, I’m learning how to etch. You can't tell by this etching, but I’m making progress. Part of making progress is learning from your mistakes. This mistake pretty much falls into the Epic category. Just about everything bad that happened here happened at the stage of applying a soft ground coating to the copper plate: the ground is too thin, unevenly & sloppily applied; fingerprints and smudges along the edges. A real crash-and-burn etching scenario.

But wait—I sometimes spend hours in Photoshop trying to make images look this grungy. I’ve paid money for backgrounds this ugly. So rather than throw the plate and print away, I scanned the bad etching, used Photoshop’s clone tool to remove the most distracting blobs and blotches, then (most importantly) pretended I created this effect on purpose (a secret trick used by famous artists). 

Ten years from now I fully expect for someone to say “I know that image. Ten years ago my art teacher used it as an example of incredibly bad etching technique.” 

Genius is seldom recognized in cases like this. However, I do feel like I’m starting to get that tortured-artist feeling. I think that’s probably a good sign.