Creating my Final etchings

Eventually I came up with a decent system for placing my paper in the right place on top of my etchings. I drew out the size of my paper in bold red pen on some newsprints, then I would place my etching onto tissue paper that was see through, and then just shift the tracing paper around until it was central to my page - this method meant I didn't scrape ink everywhere and could just reuse these templates!

 

The texture of the plates has printed best of all on this plate. Although not all of the plates had a texture, some were just plain. I tried to pick the textured plates to go with a composition that I think it would suit the most, and how well they would hence work in their sets.

Here was the photo etching failed copper plate that I got to make my finals with. It has some really ideal marks on it that I am actually really pleased with how they came out. They added a good amount of texture, which as it wasn't such a deep indentation on the plate, printed far more lightly.

The drawing and line work really isn't good. The balance of the composition is very off, but since the texture of the background adds to the effect, and I didn't have a second plate with that, and also due to time constraints I didn't really have a chance to re draw a new one.

The colours almost worked. I decided to ink them in pink and blue, blue being for the wizard and pink for the witch in the individual hat prints. This was to be a bit of a play on gender cliches, such as blue representing males for a baby, and pink for a female. I used this to highlight out the general gender wars and misogyny which is perhaps the strongest running theme of the book. On this one were they clash I switched them around as a way of communicating the curious mix up and bewildering struggle for Esk being the first ever female Wizard - that isn't initally allowed or supposed to be one!

This was the print that I added right at the end to complete the third set of etchings. As an image conceptually it could be pushed much more, the hand should really look quite strange and wizzardy, and the roll up should look more silly, and clear that it is a roll up. Sometimes though with etching at this small scale it is quite hard to depict that level of detail, but there could still be an improvement on this.

It was quite difficult choosing which prints I would keep in my final set. Most of my prints were't that good, or just not quite right. I tried to pick ones that worked best as a set, going for ones with a similar density level, clearness and quality of line. They are certainly a lot stronger as a set in general, the over all texture and general look and feel of etching prints very slightly overrides the drawings and inking's not being as good as I might have liked them to be.