Procreate doodlings

 

I've been tinkering with Procreate on my iPad, and I made this little illustration of a dungeoneer dungeoneering. It's a quick little doodle, and not nearly fully realized, but I quite like it.

Presentation Box

 

This is what I've been working on for the last couple of days: a presentation box as part of a farewell gift for one of Annette's colleagues who is leaving.

I'm not 100% sure what the timber is, but I think it's probably matai. I got it from an old flooring joist, and matai was used a lot for that sort of thing. The splines are white oak.

The plaque is copper, deep-etched with a manaia design.

It's a fairly crappy photograph, but I just snapped it with my phone by room light, so I guess you reap what you sow.

Occult Beauty

 

I'm in the process of making a presentation box out of pieces cut from an old flooring joist. I'm not 100% sure what the timber is, but I think it's matai.

It amazes me that builders and joiners in Olden Tymes largely ignored the stunning beauty of these native timbers, and instead just wasted them on unseen construction. Our house was built in 1920, and it has rimu panelling throughout, but that's not due to any virtue of rimu itself, but because at the time it was much cheaper than "proper" English timbers for the purpose, and our house was intended for the hoi-polloi, not the nobs.

Old joists and flooring are a good source of some very nice wood, if you can still find them, but you do have to beware of ancient broken-off nails hidden inside. They're getting harder and harder to come upon these days, as old construction timbers and panelling and what-not were mostly just discarded into landfill when the old houses were demolished.

Plaque in Progress

 

Etching today.

I'm using Lascaux acrylic stop-out varnish as a resist to deep-etch a piece of approx. 2mm copper that will eventually be a plaque inset in a box top. The Lascaux is easily cleaned up with water while it's wet, and later on it can be removed with meths.

The mordant is "Edinburgh Etch", which is a combination of ferric chloride and citric acid. It's a lot safer on skin than nitric or hydrochloric, and it also bites fast and clean. Note: "safer" is a relative term; I still wouldn't go bathing in it.

It's a relatively warm day today, so I shouldn't have to go to all the faff of warming the bath. I'll probably have to etch for four to six hours to get the depth I want.

The tape is so that the back of the plate doesn't etch, and the chopstick rests on the lip of the mug to hold the plate vertical in the bath and to allow me to lift it out without touching it.

And now, six hours or so later, it's done.

The size is about 75 x 100 mm.

The etching really reveals the grain of the metal — not a grain in the way that wood has a grain, but gravity acting on the tiny granules of copper separated by the acid makes them slide down the face of the metal so the bite becomes uneven. There's also an element of uneven density within the metal itself, a relict of the way the sheets are produced in rolling presses.

Spooooooon!

 What have I been up to? I've been filing and sanding and polishing a teaspoon.

This is not because I'm awfully anally particular about the implements I use to stir my coffee. It's because a stainless steel teaspoon, all nicely rounded off and polished, is a very useful tool for hand-printing relief prints.

The bowl of the spoon is used for rubbing down larger areas, and the rounded end of the handle is useful for picking out detail areas.

I've slightly re-curved the handle to make it more useful in this respect, and I've also engraved my name on to it so that no bugger can accidentally claim it as theirs.

Bird Woodcut

 

Here's a quickie woodcut I did this afternoon on a bit of 3mm marine ply I had lying around.

It's about 120 x 155mm, printed on 45gsm layout paper — not quite tracing paper, but nearly.

The texture of the wood grain shows quite nicely I think.