Making Slow Electronic Progress

Here's the image I prepared for my photoetching. I don't know if it will work because for some reason my printer isn't printing black ink. I changed it to gray scale in PhotoShop, and it did print in a sort of brown shade. But I don't know if it will be too pale to work. And then that also means I have to figure out why my printer isn't working and either get another or somehow get it fixed. I used the cleaning feature that comes with it, but that didn't solve the problem. Compared to that old daisy wheel I use to make nasty comments about, this printer is a dream. But I understand that printers are so cheap now and come with ink so that it's less expensive to buy a new printer than buy ink cartridges. I admit that sounds very wasteful to me. It's our consumer society that creates that mentality.

I spent the day working on creating and printing business cards. After reading the directions that came in the package, I had no trouble. Funny how that works. I think lots of us who learned to use the computer in the old days have a habit of not reading directions. There was a time when the help manuals were extremely unhelpful. I can remember when I use to use that text editor on the mini computer, I'd get a message that said error 327 or something like that. Even consulting the manual was no help. So most of us just learned by trial and error. We learned a great deal, but it was frustrating.

The image above is the same one I used on my business card, smaller and turned sideways. Originally it was a drawing in one of my sketchbooks that I took a photo of with my cellphone. Before I altered it in PhotoShop to make it grayscale, it was printing with a sort of green tinge to it. I liked that and added some olive green text to it for the information about me. The business cards I got are ivory so it makes a nice combination. Of course, I could have scanned in the image, but my scanner isn't set up yet, so I used the photo instead. Philip said to me recently, "you really use your cellphone a lot." Yes, I do.

So now I'm waiting for one of my copper plates to finish etching. I put rosin and stop out on it last week, and now I've got it in the ferric chloride. I was worried about the weather being cooler, but we suddenly have hot weather again, so I don't have that concern. I'll leave it in for an hour and hope that works. I'd like to print another edition this week, but it occurs to me that if I'm adding aquatint to several plates, I could then print on both Tuesday and Thursday of next week. Then I'd be back on schedule. I'll aim for that if worse comes to worst.