Starting off this week I finished drawing up a new stone, this time I was more focused on Romanticism influences when doing the portrait. I also wanted to avoid using the tusche wash and instead just use a Korn lithograph pencil to draw the portrait.
One minor mishap I had was that after drawing the portrait I realised in fact that I had drawn the portrait with a lead pencil core, which with lithographs is not usually done as lead isn't particularly greasy enough to stay on the stone after etching. It was too dense to then draw over the image with a proper lithograph crayon so after some deliberation we decided to attempt to etch the stone despite not knowing how it would turn out or if the drawing would come out at all. The two pictures below show the pencil drawing on the stone before etching:
Then below I have put a gallery of images showing how the portrait looked at each stage of the etching process, giving us an insight into what can happen with pencil in this process. The first image shows the stone after the first etch with just gum gently dabbed over and left on top of it for a few days, the second then being the second etch where we used turps to rub off the image. At this stage I was pretty convinced the pencil would come right off and we'd have no residual image, however the third image shows the marks we were left with afterwards. Then looking at the fourth and fifth image which show the stone after rolling it up with ink the drawing really comes up, I was so surprised to see that even some of the faint marks I had made managed to stay on, albeit the final result is a lot lighter in places than the original and its lost some marks but overall despite thinking it wouldn't work at all it was a success.
Below show the final prints on paper, which came out well considering the mistake I made, next week I am going to attempt adding colour to bring to the print to life a bit more, so will see how that turns out!
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