Something happened this week in my process that I want to try and pin down for a while.
I’ve been doing digital etchings. Or that’s what I’m calling them. Sometimes I literally just erase parts of a photograph I’ve taken, working in Procreate with digital pencils that make the surface look almost fabric like- knitted. Threads pulled together to make new textures.
Yesterday I was erasing an image of a flower seed head. I’d put down a layer of digital encaustic over the top of the photo, and I was erasing into the encaustic with a view to removing the photo layer later. But then on a whim I merged the photo and the encaustic into a single layer and started etching into both at once. And something shifted.
The image started coming alive in a new way. Not because I was adding to it but because every small mark of erasure seemed to build on, rather than remove the image. That was mystifying to me. I’d always thought of drawing as building up, not taking away. The drawing was emerging from removal. Which seems strange and somehow unsurprising at the same time. I’ve previously thought about the power etching has conceptually and physically, but I’d never seen it really be demonstrated so obviously in my own work.
There’s something I want to explore further here. You spend so long carefully erasing, in crosshatches, line by line, until the photograph you started with doesn’t exist anymore. But through that erasure you’ve created something new. Something that’s neither the original photo nor the encaustic surface but a third thing. Born from the collision of the two being subtracted at the same time.
Drawing like this isn’t about trying to cover the surface. It’s about responding to what’s emerging and trying to see the image overall. Not focusing in too much on one area, not becoming too tight, not approaching things too logically. It’s a mindful process. And there’s something in the tools themselves. The digital pencils I’m drawn to are the ones that make the surface look knitted. It is a bit like knitting. Putting threads together and making new surfaces. Feeling how tight or loose the stitches are in your hands.
Procreate as an app is a pretty blunt tool. Inexpensive, accessible but most importantly to me it’s intuitive and tactile to use. I like that it’s really quite rudimentary and that idea of creating a complex image from simple tools is interesting to me.
The digital erasing has made me think a lot about what happened during the printmaking class at CSM.
I got a zinc plate from Paul, the printing teacher, and started to etch it. He said it didn’t have to be laborious. There was hard ground on the plate already, so I should think of it as a line drawing. We’d put it in the acid and I could add more tone later. Simple enough.
But I got completely obsessed with the hand etching. Hours of it. Everyone else had moved on to actually printing and I was still sitting there, scratching away at the plate. Something about the way the needle slides across the hard ground. It was way less laborious than I’d expected. More fluid than drawing with the Apple Pencil, in a way. You can get really nice marks. I didn’t want to stop.
The image I was etching was one of the Dingwall buildings. A tumble down laundrette, falling to bits but beautiful to look at, or so I think. It felt kind of fitting to be sitting in the actual CSM printmaking studio using an image of a boarded-up laundrette from a fly-blown Highland high street. Contemporary art made from ramshackle imagery.
When I eventually started printing I didn’t feel like the plate had enough tone. Paul has a bit of a sense with people. He can look at what you’re doing and think about what might suit your technique. He handed me a litho crayon I’d never used before and said to do some line work with it. But it was so chunky and it started melting in my hand and the most obvious thing, the thing I couldn’t stop myself doing, was rubbing it into the surface of the plate. Just like the way I’m drawn to do with an encaustic surface.
When we put it through the acid and printed it, something surprising happened. The litho crayon had created this strange texture. Almost ghostly. Almost akin to my encaustic, beeswax work. Paul was looking at it, a bit puzzled, wondering how that effect had emerged. I’d used the litho crayon in the wrong way, but sometimes wrong can be just right.
Here’s what’s interesting. The litho crayon doesn’t fully resist the acid the way hard ground does. It’s more of an organic resist. Partial, unpredictable. The acid gets through in places, creating a texture you can’t fully control. And that unpredictability is what made the print come alive. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t precise. It was something else. Something with the same quality as the digital erasing. A third thing emerging from the collision of intention and accident.
I want to work into that plate more. And I’ve ordered some copper because I think copper would lend itself really well to combining photo etching with hand etching. It captures fine lines and surface detail in a way that could let me use photographs as a starting point and then go into them by hand. The same gesture as the digital erasing but physical. Actual acid. Actual metal. Actual resistance.
I’m also trying out photopolymer on zinc. But the copper feels right. There’s something about the material. Warmer, more responsive, more forgiving than zinc. I want to find a way forward where I can use photographs but also hand etch. Where the digital and the manual aren’t separate practices but the same practice in different materials.
Maybe choosing to draw Dingwall after CSM is a way of playing with the impostor syndrome rather than being crushed by it. Holding both ends of the spectrum and saying this is my range. This is where I live. The laundrette and the Granary Building. The Highland road and the gallery.
I said something to Jonathan that surprised me even as I was saying it. I told him the course feels like it’s designed to help us break our own rules. And then I said it’s like removing the house we’ve built inside, brick by brick.
I think that’s what learning actually is. Not adding to your mental load. Not accumulating knowledge. But breaking down the walls we’ve built that separate us from really experiencing life. Clearing out the rubble so new ideas have space to arrive. Making room.
And maybe that’s what the erasing does too. Every crosshatch removed from the image is a brick coming out of the wall. Every layer stripped away is a barrier to perception being lifted. The drawing that emerges isn’t something I’ve built. It’s something I’ve uncovered.
The last thing that happened to me in London was a conversation with a man sitting outside Kings Cross. He was homeless. I asked about his life and he told me about a hard upbringing, about wanting to be a locksmith. I said if I can go from the Highlands of Scotland to living my dream of going to art college in London, then you can do whatever you want. He laughed.
As I was leaving I asked him, half joking, half not, how do I deal with this impostor syndrome?
He looked at me for a moment. And then with a tone of authority that hadn’t been there before he said:
Don’t need to worry about the impostor syndrome. That’s why you’re good.
We both laughed. And with that, I left London.