Romanticism Dry-Point Print.

I'm back!!! Right off the bat this has been a very busy week. For one, there is lots of Yearbook stuff to do, I had a presentation about furniture designers this week, I have to make a custom chair out of foam and that's just off the top of my head. There is most likely more to do that I am just not remembering. But anyway, on to the main event. Before the break, my class and I were in the middle of the Romanticism unit. For those who don't know what Romanticism is, it was an art movement that commonly based their themes off of myth, literature, legend etc. It stressed strong emotion, imagination, freedom from classical correctness and rebellion against social conventions. We had a choice of two mediums to do our projects in, Dry Point Print and a Collage. I chose dry point print. Now without any further a due, let us get to my Artist statement.

So this is the very first one I made. I call it Inferno. The concept of this print was based off of the first part of Divine Comedy called Inferno by Dante Alighieri. This print shows main character Dante stuck in the 9th and final layer of hell(which is described as icy instead of fiery) reaching for a door which is supposed to be the exit out of hell into Purgatory. This was the very first one that I created and I think it turned out the best technically. I feel like I used a lot of leading lines to point to the prints intended focal point which was the door. I wanted to emphasise the door as the focal point by making the door the biggest thing in the foreground.

After my first print, I then started to use colour in my prints. The colour helped people tell if it was ice or stalagmites. In this print I more wanted to stick to darker colours because in the print proceeding this one, I used lighter colours that did not show up well on the paper. In this particular print, I tried to make it so the focal point wasn't the entire door but the doorknob. I would say that the colour that stood out the most in this print was the the blue of the ice. It had a very cold, icy look to it.

The intent for my final print was to try some odd colouration for the ice. I layered blue and red on top of each other so they would blend together. Parts of the ice were more red then blue and vise versa. This time, I made the door the focal point by making it the brightest object on the print. To make sure that it show, I mixed a bright yellow together with a dull yellow. It worked really well because the door still looks very bright but it is still visible on the page.

Side note: I know people noticed who that dude is in the background, well that's the devil. There's a whole story for that.

Unfortunately there were mistake in the print that were there when I etched the plate. The lines were uneven, there were smudges on the plate that I couldn't see which printed on to the paper with the image. The ink is also faint on certain parts of the images. That could be because of 2 reasons. 1) The etch lines were too shallow, so they didn't hold the ink properly. OR 2) I wiped too much of the ink out. Anyway, I thought that this was a successful project. I got to work the printer which was cool and I made an cool piece. It wasn't perfect, but it was still pretty awesome. If you're interested in the Divine Comedy story and want the full scoop, check out the link.