Chickens 29 Feb 04
Chickens figure large in my work mainly because we have lots of them around here. But they are quite nice to draw. At one time I had an idea for doing pictures of various chicken breeds but I went off the idea because these chicken fanciers are so fussy about the exact standards of their breed that I decided there would always be a feather out of place or something. Otherwise there may be a knock on the door in the night from the chicken police.
Click on a picture to see a large version of it.
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Etching. Here is a chicken drawn from my imagination which is probably why it looks like a donut with the head, tail and feet of a chicken. Oddly, people seem to like it so I kept it.
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Etching. I made this etching in the winter in my very cold studio. Something odd happened to the liquid wax resist I was using and it ended up with tiny pits all over the surface of the copper plate. But actually I quite liked the effect, like someone had shaken pepper all over. |
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Etching. Another imaginary chicken looking a little less like a donut. |
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Etching. I'd been looking at some Picasso etchings when I did this. I always thought that it looked a bit like a cross between a cockerel and a tyranosaurus rex. I was going to call it "Tyranosaurus Cox". I get frustrated with etching because the lines come out too even in thickness. On this one I tried using a blunt knife to get some variation in thickness. I think it was partially successful. If you try to make the lines too wide they don't hold the ink. |
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Linoprint Here's a colourful one. I had a bit of lino left over in this shape so I gave myself the task of trying to fit a chicken into it. You can decide how successful I was. |
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Etching I've never really got the hang of colour etching. The colours change so much, especially the yellows which tend to go green. Also if you rub them too much they look washed out. I've seen coloured etchings by other people and they look really bright but I don't know how they do that. This was a series of trial prints using 2 colour aquatint. When I finished them all I laid them out on a table and I thought they looked nice so I framed them all together. A bit like Andy Warhol's Marilyn except with chickens. I also had problem with the aquatint which seems to flatten very quickly after a few prints. The first ones come out quite well but then they get lighter and lighter. You can see this if you look at the plate with a magnifying glass. |
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Etching. This one was a reworking of the first one but with a bigger and more detailed plate. But as it often happens I think the orginal one is better. |
