sketches

Day three hundred and fifteen: On Friday afternoons we’ve been hosting a printmaking class in the study room. Today we were looking at some prints by Mauricio Lasansky, and one in particular caught my attention. This sketch is a study of a small detail from one of his intaglio prints, for which the copper plate was engraved, gauged out to create white areas, and etched using a needle, soft ground, and aquatint. That wasn’t enough, however, because the artist also scraped and burnished the plate to achieve the desired final result. My attempt to emulate Lasansky’s image included the use of various pencils, oil pastel, and conte crayon, but doesn’t do the original justice in terms of form and depth of tone. Still, by trying to sketch it, I learned just how much detail and variety Lasansky worked into the plate. What you see here is supposed to be an abstracted horse’s head, but my proportions are off, and so I’m not sure it looks like much of anything but shapes and patterns.