From cabbages to onions

The second week of the printmaking course, and this time it was drypoint etching. The vegetable theme continued from cabbages, because today the teacher thought my photo of onions would work best. The stalks had been chopped off so I copied some stalks from an Edward Weston photo, and made some up.

We started off with a test sheet, to try out different techniques (we were engraving on acetate).

This was followed by variations of our real picture:

In sepia ink
As above, but a ghost print ( a second print, so fainter)
A re-ink of the plate with sepia, but this time with the dark background at the top rather than bottom of the image. I prefer this. I rubbed the ink off the stems with cotton buds.
The ghost print with Chine collé (tissue paper pressed onto the image)
A black version, which was a preparation for the next print.
You don’t need new glasses. I superimposed a green print on the black one, but offset it slightly. I’m not keen on the effect!