Alison Kinnaird has been a guest artist in the studio for two days a week for the past month. It has been a fantastic opportunity, she is such a wealth of knowledge and so willing to share and support us. We had a lot of discussions about how best to draw for engraving, and so much about how to copper wheel engrave. I have to admit, that I've been a little afraid of the copper wheel until now, just worried that I will try to shape a wheel and totally grind it away to nothing or something along those lines, so it was really great to get instruction in that. She also told us how to do lettering, which I didn't get a chance to practice, but I would like to in the future.
Here's some pictures of things I've started on with her here... definitely not finished, but, on the way. It's funny, the copper wheel make flashed glass a lot less intimidating, since it cuts slower than diamond, which in that case in quite nice, but since I'm so used to such a thick layer of glass to cut through, I find it very easy to over-shoot.
These are for some camera obscura, I'm making some of them couching figures that are as anonymous as I can make them because I would like people to project themselves into the image, to be able more to identify. Some people identify with specifics, some don't, so I'm making a range of different projection planes, so I can play with what is more evocative. The top one is going to have to become more line-based, since I need a lot more clear in the surface for my purposes... My engraving is becoming an interesting blend of cameo and intaglio, and a lot more line-oriented than I've ever been taught, since my goals are to have the image make sense, and to have a reasonably readable amount of projection in the object. The front, cameo piece below would not be interesting with the projection behind it, you would only see the very edges, and they are the most blurry, obscure, distorted part.
I feel a little bad, that I wasn't able to fully take advantage of Alison being here because I've been distracted by screwing up ceramics, and by having my context at the same time that she's been here many Fridays. It's been valuable, but I wish I had done better to get the most out of her being around.