Dry point Plate:
Playing with the amount of ink on the plate:
Here I have tried printing using the cotton bud to remove some of the ink, leaving an almost vignette effect with more ink around the edges and a cleaner plate. Personally I like the vignetted effect as it adds some of the atmosphere of the forest back into the image.
I really like these combination of colours, when I put them onto the plate they created an almost grain like appearance which I wanted to see what it would print like:
The texture is interesting but it didn't quite work out like I thought it would:
Book Paper:
I like using a lot of old book paper as a background, so I thought the combination of the texture and words running up the trees would be interesting however this didn't quite go as planned. Because the paper is too thin to soak I used a dry piece at first which didn't pick up a lot of the finer areas of ink except for the edges where I had left more ink on purpose for the vignetting, with some experimentation, I did eventually manage a very faint impression of the trees but not enough to create a well finished print. I think that these would work nicely as filters though, so I'm glad I tried it.
Flowers:
I had a bag of pressed flowers lying around which I thought linked in nicely to the forest theme; initially I wanted to make up some collagraph plates using these but not having the money for mountboard I decided to see what would happen if I incorporated them into the drypoint process; I really like the results achieved, especially the imprints left behind on the plates after going through the press which I have included some photos of as the prints didn't turn out like them. It would be interesting to see what would happen with something more translucent like a skeleton leaf.
Edited Prints:
I photographed the imprints off the back of the plates too as I thought they might make interesting texture filters with the combination of tissue paper and ink:
