There, I did it!

In my last post about learning how to intaglio print I finished with,

I have some steel sheets that I'm going to try with the rose drawing again. I would like at least one clean print from it that I can frame and say, ‘There! I did it!’

So here we are. I did a few more prints and some were better than others. What you see above is I think the best of them, and is I think the best I can do with these plates. Because the plate itself traps some ink and creates 'plate tone', at this point I was aiming to create better smudges around the actual rose drawing. The next set of plates I will do some polishing so there's less of that and then I can see what kinds of images I can make. Plate tone is a whole thing you can have fun with, but I'd like to be able to control it better to give myself more range.

It might sound like I'm not very pleased with the print I've made but actually I am, it represents a significant achievement. I learned a hell of a lot doing this, so I'm going to frame it. Who knows what I'll think of it in future.