Skipping Rocks

My pity party from Monday is over. Thanks for the well wishes. :) I've learned that when down, it's best not to binge watch TV. On the up side, once Mad Men season 6 was consumed, I moved on to cleaning cabinets and that did a world of good. I marched back into the studio today and actually feel renewed! Yay! Besides, my experience gave me at least a title for a print (not this one below, but a new one)--Illegitimi non carborundum.

Detail of plate on rock skipping, started eons ago.

I brought this plate out of the archives to work on. I learned quite a bit about gesso as a background texture when I was working on Newton--love it! It does need to be sealed with diluted PVA because some of it wipes off when cleaning the plate after printing. (I guess with Akua one could just leave ink residue on the plate and never seal it, but should the plate need to be reworked, ya gotta get the ink off of there.) I've been sealing with 2 coats of 1:1 water to PVA. To keep brush strokes to a minimum, I card on the mixture.

Stuff I need to do on this plate:
1. seal this baby since I learned the hard way that gesso is impermanent.
2. make some areas lighter by applying coats of PVA--diluted or not, multiple coats or not, depending on how light I want it.
3. add more text by tracing printed text using a pencil and tissue paper. Flip tissue paper over so pencil is face down on plate and burnish.
4. ink this baby and proof.

I did start that new plate--the one mentioned above, Illegitimi non carborundum. I have lots of loose ideas jumping around in my noggin. It'll be fun to see where it goes since I'm being non-characteristically spontaneous when working the plate.