an accurate prediction

As expected, I was not capable of remaining upright and awake for the duration of the day, so shortly after getting home from several hours of printing, I did indeed zonk out. Gosh, what a shock.

The auction was uneventful, although I did get there a little later than I normally do and had to wait a half hour to unload the birds. Now I just have a couple of halfway decent BBRed cockerels and a few pairs of Brown Reds to sell...for now...maybe more in a few months. I'm keeping more than I usually do so that I can show about a gazillion of them at the National meet(s) in January. That is going to be so much work. Oh geez, I'll give myself a headache thinking about it.

So anyway, after dropping off birds I headed over to the print studio, got there at 8am.. I had some problems with the etching plate--lines I thought I had successfully scraped/buffed out were worse in places. I'd never done much with scraping a zinc plate before, but I now know there is a very specific way to do it! I didn't expect to be able to pull a lot of prints from this particular plate. It's so finely etched and such a subtle variations in tones I really thought it would wear out and lighten up pretty quick, but it totally held up til I reached the end of my paper supply....and I wished I had more paper! I am debating getting more and going in again to print more. I have 13 good prints (7 bad ones) but I think I could print more good ones. I always feel obliged to get as many prints out of a plate as I can. So, hmmm. Then again, I've never sold out an edition, so I'm not sure having a larger number of prints would even be beneficial. The higher the number of prints, the lower the price will be. I hate pricing art. Some people say I overprice, some say I underprice. Maybe I really should just double everything!!! ;-)

Anyway, I got home around 2, and decided to see how my bed was feeling around 3, and then the next thing I knew it was 5. And what did I dream about for those two hours? Printmaking. Over and over and over and over I saw my hand inking the plate, buffing off the ink, wiping it clean, over and over and over. Holy crap. As if I didn't see that enough in real life today, I then had to take a nap and dream it all over again? No wonder I'm still tired, that's like I did another two hours of printing!

Sleepy time.