Art Every Day

I just returned from a 3-day workshop with Carol Wax in Norwalk Connecticut to learn Mezzotint. For those of you that aren’t familiar with what a mezzotint is, it is an intaglio process that starts with a ground that is created by several means such as rolling it with a dry-point roulette or rocking the plate with a mezzotint rocker that creates 1,000s of tiny burrs on the plate. If the plate were printed when the ground is completed, the entire image would be black. The artist then creates the image in a ‘reductive’ manner–the burrs are scraped and polished back to white.

Here is my first print–I’m really happy with it. The image is 3×2 inches (not very big). It took 3-4 hours to create the ground using my 3-inch mezzotint rocker. Then, the image took about 2-3 hours to create, plus a little more for proofing and fine-tuning.

I can’t tell you how many times (oh…4, 5?) I’ve paid good money to take watercolor classes and I have failed miserably. I’m going to spare you those images, not post them here so you can agree with me.

So, I found the most incredible work on a site where the artist embellishes monotypes with watercolor and colored pencils. That’s what’s inpired my recent posts, right? So, quickly I realized that I just don’t understand watercolors. I can do a tolerable job with colored pencils (at least, I think it’s tolerable!) but I figured I’d better learn how to do watercolors.

I found  a couple of really good books that point out that you really have to have GOOD materials, and the dirt-cheap watercolor tubes I bought for my classes just didn’t cut it. You know the ones (without naming names)…$2 for 24 tubes of ‘fine artist’s watercolors’? If they’re so fine, how come there’s no pigment information on the tubes? So, I shopped around and figured out that Winsor Newton are the ones to have. Ummm…$26 for a tiny tube of Alizarin Crimson. Maybe I don’t need THAT fine a quality watercolors while I’m learning, so I bought a Cotman set (still Winsor Newton, but their ’student’ grade) of half-pans. What a difference! I’ve been happily following the instructions in the watercolor method books I bought and I think I’m starting to figure this out!

Anyway, here is a painting I did for the Virtual Paintout this month (which is Corsisa).