Time Management

Since I am only in the studio on Fridays,  I am organizing my time so that I am able to take full advantage of the hours I do have in the studio.  The great thing about these mezzotints is that their small scale makes the copper plates portable, and the scraping process is not messy.  This allows me to work on the scraping process at home, so that I can focus all of my time in the studio exclusively on proofing the plates.  I’ve been squeezing in an hour here, an hour there at night after I come home from teaching all day.

I am trying to be conservative with my first pass of scraping.  With mezzotint, once an area is scraped you can’t make it darker, so it’s better to slowly build the highlights in incremental stages.