Another Relief Exercise in ABS Engravers Plastic

 Another Relief Exercise in ABS Engravers Plastic

This is another project using ABS engraver's plastic. Same 1/20" thick 8"x12" sheet. 

This one is titled "Poulet! Poulet!". It is a favorite scene from a favorite classic film, To Catch a Thief. In it, Grace Kelly's character has been driving Cary Grant's character at high speed to escape police surveillance. She has to brake hard for a chicken in the road. After she drives on, we hear a crash. In the next scene, the police are on the radiophone trying to explain why they crashed while the chicken strolls in the road. 

As seems to be my usual fate, I didn't like where the first cutting was going and recut the plate. 

This was the first time I used multi-line tools. The men's suits are toned with a 45 lpi 1/8" tool. I also made extensive use of the rotary file. The foreground roadway was made by repeatedly touching the cone file bit to the material to leave plenty of black. The shadow is made by more sparsely picking at the plastic with a tool tip. The window cuts were made with the same cone file bit. The sky was made by making long, rough cuts with the file bit. The face of the rock wall was made with a smaller ball file bit using a small rotary engraver. 

This is an easier plate to print than the previous Wolf Woman plate. This one has no large cut areas that have a critical need to print cleanly without erroneous inking. When the upper part, the lower roadway part and the rock wall are all chattery anyway, it hardly matters if a bit of them picks up some ink. I did deep cut the other whites. But here's what happened. 

The top background did not come out as I had hoped. The whole piece was too busy to make visual sense. The white parts need a lot more filing down. I should have left the roadway more finely grained and worked out how to make the chicken stand out more against it. The road might have been better nearly all white. with the chicken fully outlined. The print overall came out way too busy. I have now reworked the roadway and the background, making both more uniformly light and the background more banded, as was intended. There's a pretty good shadow dynamic going on with the central car and people figures that need their own space. 

With the foreground cut deeper and the chicken left high, it looks much better. 

I'll be revisiting this one in the future, applying some things I've learned from it.