Good news/bad news...

Gave up on the acetate sheets, pilfered some acrylic from the spouse (and mooched his scribes, too), and had better success with the drypoint bit. This is a proof of the second design (i'll probably go back to the goose later, but this was more suited to the theme of the print exchange i signed up for, and - at the scale i had to work on for that - lino just wasn't cooperating).

The bad news? After i'd pulled the one decent proof pictured here, i came home from an errand to find the plate in pieces on the floor. Back to the drawing board for the print exchange...

Not quite ready for prime time...

I got a bit of a wild hair on Saturday to try my hand at drypoint - a printing technique that involves scribing into a plate, inking the plate, wiping most of the ink off, and pressing onto dampened paper to transfer the ink that remains in the scribed lines. It didn't go entirely as planned, of course, but the process and the troubleshooting has been kinda fun. It's still not there yet, but i think it's got promise. I was working from a photo of the neighbor's self-important goose. (Come to think of it, "self-important goose" is probably redundant...)