Cheap Girl Draws

Working on the office and studio cleanup and happily have solved some of my mobile blogging issues with ShoZu and the kind help of sbrogers.com.

Well – everywhere! Okay – so I had a little bit of administrative scanning to do, and now the pictures are finally getting up. I was busy wrapping up my printmaking and got a tad behind with figuring out where the books were. I was busy with this:

Anyhow, for those of you who have lost track, there are now nine notebooks on their journey around the country.
We have book 1 going to Boston, book 2 is still in North Carolina, book 3 is in New York City, book 4 is in Denver, book 5 is headed to Chicago, book 6 is headed to LA, book 7 is somewhere in SF and books 8 and 9 are being scanned. If you have the books, don’t forget to take a picture of it – out and about wherever it is!

To see the latest from book No. 1 – go here. I need artists from NYC to receive the book – just let me know at cheapgirldraws at yahoo dot com.

My latest etching is based on a drawing I did a few years ago of a really really old lady at the cafe. (Notice, she is in her bedroom slippers.) I wanted to add a fortune teller mystic to the etching and changed the original drawing a bit to add an air of mystery. Anyhow, I thought that I’d share the evolution from drawing to first line etch to aquatint print below:

The etching class has been a great bunch of fun but also has limited my ability to produce other drawings. Suddenly I am removed from the hour sketch to hours of tiny details!

Well, they can’t all be good days. About a week ago I had an etching disaster. The hard ground in our studio had not enough ground in it and viola – all of my delicate little lines in my etching became super etched resulting in a heavy, plodding image of my little balloon babooshka.

In a wild and daring move, I have decided to scrape out the balloon and turn the plate upside down. Hence, the puppet man will return as a second life for this plate. The other option was to cut the plate in half and redraw the top portion of the plate.

You can see here how fat the lines etched. Sadly for me, these lines are very deep as well so I’ll be needing a little bit of elbow grease to scrape this one out!

Farewell!