Natalie G11 & 12 Artist Portfolio '15 - '17

For this piece, I felt like I kind of struggled with creating an idea that I liked at first, however I had developed one of my earlier ideas of a fingerprint collage into this piece of individual fingerprints printed on book pages.  As I knew these characters, I could pair up the personality type for each fingerprint to match the personalities of the characters quite easily as well as figure out which colour I would want to print each fingerprint in.  I had planned my time around when I had class as that would be the only time I could print out my etchings.  I had done all the etchings at home using a compass and then, I had split them into two different groups so I would print half of them first then the other half, just based on the fact that we had a limited amount of time with the printing press.  For the etchings, I had drawn out with a marker, the curved lines of each fingerprint type (which I had created myself considering that these are fictional characters), and then when I etched with the compass on the acetate sheets, I would go over my lines to add thickness to match the prints that I had drawn, which would add to the saturation and vibrancy of the colours when I printed as there would be more of it.  For the printing, as many of the colours I had to mix, a lot of the prints came out slightly different in hue and shade, so I would print several of them then selecting my favourite one.  It took a lot of rubbing to remove the amount of ink I placed on the etch as I had to get the colour just right and as I was mixing right on the plate, I couldn't tell the colour beforehand.  That was probably the most time consuming aspect to the process of printing as I had to get the colour exactly right.