Art Every Day

My husband has a favorite coffee mug that our son gave him some years back, but the handle is cracking so he stopped using it. I used it as a model for this mezzotint. My goal for this print was to gain confidence with the medium. The biggest challenge (for me at least) has been figuring out how to print correctly. I’ve got the scraping and burnishing part well understood, but getting the pressure just right has been a challenge. I’m so glad I took that workshop from Carol Wax because we learned a lot of troubleshooting that you just can’t get out of a book.

Here is the first print I pulled using a standard pressure like you would for etching, using 3 blankets–catcher, cushion and pusher. This scan doesn’t show exactly how the print looks, but I think you can see what I’m talking about. The blacks are weak, the details are muddy–you’d think that I messed up the plate!

Here is the same plate, same wiping technique, but I did various things to increase the pressure: Eliminated the cushion, cranked the pressure as far as I could get it and put four layers of dry stonehenge on top of the plate and the damp Rives BFK. Again, scans don’t really show this very well, but the difference between these two prints in real life is astonishing.