The Crawdad that Keeps on Giving

Yes, I know that you are saying to yourself, "What a redundant title. Of course crawdads keep on giving. Of all the decapods, the crawdad is the most selfless and magnanimous." This is of course true. But I mean in the artistic sense. I have been recycling this crustacean for a couple of years now.

Gaze upon the original:

This drawing has been on this blog before. But I like it that much. Since that initial drawing, I've made this image into a couple of collagraphs. 

Here are the plates; one of them is made from the positive image and one of them is from the left over negative image:

 

Making collagraphs is not really difficult. The idea is simple enough; make a plate that has a variety of textures that will hold varying degrees of ink and then print. Simple. However, PRINTING a collagraph is not always so easy. At least not for me. Here's the first attempt at a straight black image:

Blech! Nothing worked out! It didn't turn out to look like the glorious image I had in my head. Here's the next go-round where I blocked out the background and tried to print a clean image of the animal only:

This is marginally better. The lines filled in too much and the sterile(ish) background leaves me feeling flat. So next I went for color. I used both of the plates for these.

I find these far more successful. I love the contrast of deep brown/black with light, airy yellow on the top image and the blend of red and yellow on the bottom image. I was particularly satisfied with these  as I was pulling these prints as a printmaking demo for a bunch of students! It's always embarrassing to have a print go awry as you are trying to position yourself as the arbiter of all printmaking knowledge to a bunch of 6th graders.

Since we all like morals to our stories, the moral of this story is to keep looking at your old work. Also, don't give up when your first attempt turns out to be absolutely terrible. And your second try isn't much better. And also, crawdads are spectacular animals. So lots of morals today.