Today's Productivity Post and Refocusing My Purpose: Consistency and Meaning in Effort

Today I pulled some drypoint prints from an acrylic sheet.

I made four pulls from each of my three shell plates.

 

I also recorded more on a painting I am doing, but my camera battery ran out and I couldn't find the charger I thought I had at my art corner.








I am also working on refining the purpose and meaning to pull my art from.
An artist could work to have a consistent body of work many ways, by design of the individual pieces, their display, style, media, etc. I would like to take it one step higher up, however.

I would rather work for and from a purpose. I crave meaning in my career and efforts, and I figure  that if the origins of the art stem from a shared purpose, or theme, that the consistency will grow out of that instead, and create a stronger unity to my body of work overall, with themes that run through the projects individually.

This re-vamping of purpose will mean re-writing my artist's statement, a lot of journaling, and changing around my portfolio. I'm ok with that. It's about the long term body of work, not the skill building simple paintings I have been doing so far.

The Process of a Hand-pulled Drypoint Print from a Plexiglass Plate

This is the story of an experiment of hand-pulling a dry-point print with oil paint and a acrylic sheet as a plate.  

I had this charcoal sketch that  I liked, but the fixative I sprayed on it  came out in globs and ruined the canvas. So I took pictures of it and am experimenting with many techniques of transferring and printing. 

This time, it's drypoint.

I taped an acrylic sheet to the top of a print out of the charcoal sketch so it wouldn't move while I was scratching the lines I wanted. The image itself is designed to be 8"x10."

This is part of the mark-making in progress.

Here is the finished plate on a black paper background to check the linework.

This is the inked plate and the oil paint I used to ink it. I learned from a few failed pulls to mix it with a bit of paint thinner first. 

I also used a dollar store squeegee to wipe off most of the paint at first, and paper napkins to clean up the edges--but not rub over the lines, if possible. 

Here are a few failed pulls. I also used a paper with too much texture, and it didn't get in the crevices.

I tried acrylic paint too, but it was my technique that wasn't working.

Here are my successful pulls!  For the scope of this project, I used no cloth under my brayer rolling pin, and instead also rubbed it with a smooth glass lid as well, and it it really worked.

 





This is my favorite print right now. I think I will try to make 5-7 altogether, and mat them to put on Etsy as editions!!!