I am going to miss print making. I don’t know if I will be able to do it when I get back to the states unless I enroll in the class. This is my Grevillea flower copper plate printed in jade green. I figured out a way to turn the relief ink into etching ink– I mix up the color I want as if I am going to do relief prints, then add two drops of linseed oil and mix it in really well… then, TADA! Etching ink. Anyway, I really love the process of copper etched plates and the wiped away look of the prints. I selectively wiped to make a vignette for the print. The printing tech complimented me on having round corners on this plate… I really was intimidated at first about dunking the plate in the ferric chloride. Once I did it a couple of times, it was no big deal. Definitely not as intense as learning how to use a plasma cutter… 😛 Anyway, I want to figure out how to do print making at home when I get back to the states. Figuring out a decent press will be the trickiest part– but I’m pretty resourceful 🙂

Since studio stuff is basically finished up for me here, it means that I have a few days to relax in between critiques and exams. I can’t make anything new in the studio because I loaded my last bisque today and will be loading my last glaze kiln on Friday. I went down to the lake on Sunday to play guitar for a bit. While I was sitting on the park bench, a water dragon came out of the bushes and sat and stared at me from about 15-20 feet away. I think they are funny little lizards (I guess they aren’t little– this one was about 28″ from head to toe). Anyway, I was strumming a chord pattern in the key of E and he just kept getting closer and closer. He would scurry a few feet, then stop for a couple of minutes. He kept doing that until he was about 12 inches away from my foot! I was a little bit nervous, but I wasn’t too scared because I knew he didn’t have any teeth to bite me with. He came right up to my left big toe, maybe an inch away… then… he tried to nibble my big toe! I just laughed and said “what do you think you’re doing? You cheeky little bastard!” and kept playing guitar while he sat there. He tried nibbling my toe two more times, then got bored and scampered away. It was really funny how he was just curious enough to come up and taste my toe. I can honestly say that I’ve never had a wild animal do that to me before. But these things are probably pretty tame… they run around campus all the time. Just another thing that I can say could happen “only in Australia” 😛