Oh hai. Bet you guys didn't know I was a printmaker XD

This is the first image of a diptych.
The second can be seen here.
Both images are actually related to a personal body of work on transgenderism.

as a side note/ I LOVE his fair isle sweater <3333

Technicalz:
Aquatint and Etching on copper.
5"x7" plate size, 8"x11" paper size.
Printed on Somerset Velvet, white, 230 gsm.
This is a trial proof testing the Somerset velvet paper, I will be editioning this however on Magnani Pescia, white, 230 gsm.


These will be for sale. I plan on editioning them both later this week or weekend. Or maybe next week, 'cause that's fall break and I'll have lots of free time.
If you'd be interested in purchasing one, send me a note.
I'm aiming for an edition of 20 for each image, but I'll update this later with the actual edition size.



This is a handmade CMYK:

I made this image using four plates. Each plate has a CMYK color on it, so there is a black plate, a magenta plate, a cyan plate, and a yellow plate.
Basically what I did was I drew his sweater, then decided on my color palette. I then went into photoshop and found colors that were similar to the ones I wanted for my palette, and got their CMYK values.
So for example: the green that I wanted to use had a CMYK value of 45, 30, 80, and 0 respectively.
So I then made an aquatint teststrip which gave me values from white to black in a gradient. I then, using a ruler, broke the gradient into 20 parts of equal value to represent percentages of 5. So, white would be 0%, black 100%, a mid-grey 50%, etc.
Then, based on those values I got for my colors, using the green again as an example. For the cyan plate I would need a 45 percent black aquatint, which based on my teststrip, which was timed, told me for anywhere that I wanted to be green, it would need to be in the acid 5.5 minutes on the Cyan plate.
I did this will all the rest of the colors across the three plates.

This was a little tricky though, because on the CYAN plate for example my lightest colors were the wolf’s fur, the tongue, and the yellow which were easy to block out, but the next lightest colors were the gray and the red. Which meant I had to block out everywhere that was gray, while still retaining the pattern for the other colors to be etched later.

The black plate didn’t have any values for adjusting color on it, it mainly served as a key plate for registration, a linear overlay, and there is a mild aquatint on it to add shadowing to the figure.

These plates represent about 80 or so hours of work, just to make them. The plate is small (5”x7”), so I was varnishing out very intricate and small details.


And, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a link to check out.