Dry-Point Print
Inspiration
MeaningThe meaning of this piece is a continuation of the meaning in my block print: obsession with love and romance. In this print I depicted the head of a person with twin roses overlaid on their eyes, surrounded by a border featuring square, angular hearts. I was originally going to use a woman for the central person, but I decided on keeping it more androgynous because I didn’t want the piece to just discuss one gender being obsessed with love, but everyone. I placed the roses because they are traditionally used as symbols of romance, and over the eyes to show the way love is all our culture seems to see sometimes, and the way people become ‘blinded by love’. I included the border around the edge both to unify the piece and to demonstrate influence of Louis Tiffany.
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Exhibition TextTitle: Seeing Red
Size: 16cm x 23cm Medium: Ink on paper Month of Completion: October 2015 This dry-point print continues the theme of obsession with love, discussing the way our culture becomes blinded by love, drawing influence from the stained glass work of Louis Tiffany. In this piece I depicted a person blinded by the roses placed over their eyes, trying to use clean, simple lines and light crosshatching for shading throughout the print. ProcessWith this piece I wanted to continue the same theme of obsession with love from my block print. My first design was to do something involving a swan, because traditionally they are seen as symbols of love and romance. I placed the swan underneath intertwining trees, another romantic cliché, and surrounded the image with a Tiffany-inspired border. I went pretty far with this design, but the whole time I really didn’t like the way it looked; it didn’t feel like something I wanted to take credit for or show anyone else. I realized I had gone too far with my previous idea of love being overly decorated and showy, and in this design it just looked flat and cliché, which you could argue was exactly the meaning I was going for, but this didn’t communicate that very well. In other words, the first design was too easy to mistake as just being stereotypical, not making a statement about a certain culture being stereotypical.
My second and final design came together much better than the first, with roses overlaid over the eyes of a person. To transfer my drawing to the printing plate I had to tape it over the original, and use carving tools to scratch the lines into the plastic. I started off using the triangular-pointed tools we had in class, but I found it too difficult to both control and get a deep enough line. I had more carving tools of my own from previous projects, and the best one I found to use was a flat, angled, more knife-like tool. Using this improved my lines, but it was still very difficult to get straight, clean lines.
The process for dry-point printing was much different than block printing, and any other printing I had done before. I found out right away that using the same amount of ink used for block printing was not going to work, all I needed was just enough to coat the ink knife. Furthermore, I didn’t even need to put ink on the entire plate, a few swipes and I could use newspaper to spread the ink to all crevices and remove excess. Using the printing press was also difficult because it was hard to keep the plate and paper straight and centered while I rolled it through. ReflectionThis project was very difficult for me, mostly when I was carving the plate. Twice I had to start over because the lines had become too crooked or out of place. Even in my last plate I wasn’t completely satisfied with how the lines looked, but I knew it was the best I could develop within the time frame. The printing process went smoother than carving, although I couldn’t quite apply the right amount of ink; usually a few spots ended up lacking enough ink, which I think did affect the overall balance of the piece, but not too much. Also printing onto paper ended up being problematic in keeping the plate and paper straight and centered; every one of my prints came out at least a bit crooked.
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