Hillside (1st state)

Mezzotint, 38 x 98 mm

This is a little mezzotint I just started. It's very little, only 38 x 98 mm, on a little scrap of zinc I found when I was fossicking about in the bottom of my intaglio equipment box.

I have no plan for this image. It's based more or less in memory, looking out through the bush on the steep hills around Lake Rotoma, where our family used to camp over the summer months.

I suspect I'll be doing some more on this plate, so I'm calling this a first-state.

I'm fond of mezzotint as an intaglio process.

Mezzotint Roulettes

I spent some more of my Art Money today on some mezzotint roulettes.

Mezzotint is a dry-point technique, in which the ink is held in thousands and thousands of tiny burrs and divots which are scraped and burnished back to create tonal variations. Where the plate is burnished smooth, it holds no ink at all; where it is completely covered, it renders a deep, velvety black.

Roulettes like these are one of the ways in which the metal plate is covered with those tiny burrs. They're basically just a steel drum, knurled with a pattern of some kind, which is pressed and rolled across the surface of the plate, leaving a pattern of divots behind. These divots can be layered and layered until the whole surface of the plate is just a fractal mess, or they can be laid down gently and carefully to create specific half-tone patterns.

(The black-handled one is actually a checkering graver, not a roulette, but never mind that).

Anyway, these little roulettes are usually pretty expensive, and a set like this would cost several hundred dollars. Fortunately for me, these ones have been hanging around in the stock of The Drawing Room pretty much forever, and I grabbed them for twenty bucks each.

Mezzotint — Headman

I've finished organising all my old plates, and now I'm getting started on making some new ones.

This is a little mezzotint on copper, about 90 x 65 mm. I like mezzotint a lot for its deep, velvety blacks and smooth tonal transitions. It was, at one time, used for very detailed images — I'm nowhere near there.

I prefer copper to zinc for this process; it scrapes and burnishes much more easily, and doesn't have zinc's tendency to stick to the steel burnishing tools. However, it is a bit more difficult to see exactly how far your burnishing and what-not has gone because of the metal's colour.

I can see that after such a long plate-making break, I'm going to need quite a bit of practice to get back to where I was. Still, I'm not wholly dissatisfied with this one.