Day four of building mayhem (oh the dust…!) and I’m actually getting a lot more done in the studio than I thought I would, experimenting further with pine resin as an aquatint. My first efforts, in I which I used it with sugar lift, were interesting - if you want the subjects of yr portraits to look as though they’re recovering from a hideous accident - but weren’t really what I was after (see the example below – and that was AFTER cosmetic surgery…). I’m not entirely sure what was happening here; it may have been that the water to melt the sugar was too hot, or that the liquid hard ground just didn’t agree with the pine resin. The ground lifted off in unsubtle blobs which was too uneven for what I’m trying to achieve.
Having abandoned the sugar lift, I am now just stopping out areas with the liquid hard ground – with much better results (see above and below). It’s easy to get in a tangle here because it means painting out the white areas with a dark liquid, but then, printmakers are used to doing things backwards anyway!
