Moth Study

I've been entertaining myself by submitting ID requests into the BugGuide.net (a great volunteer, mostly expert amateur, resource to identify all sorts of insect and insect-like critters) to find out what insects I've been taking pictures of.

While one of my favourites remains:

not the least of which reason is the name: golden dung fly (honestly, that says it all); but I also submitted a lovely-patterned moth photo:

which turned out to be a type of Sphinx Moth, and I wanted to do something with it.

Being more interested in the print and the result rather than spending time on the drawing (I'm lazy - that's normally how I work for prints), I traced the photo onto onion skin (very thin, lightweight tracing paper) then rubbed the tracing onto my piece of Safety Kut. Then it was just a matter of carving those delicate little lines.

This first print is just one colour (Faust AquaLine water soluble relief ink, using a lot of transparent base to very little pigmented ink, to get a nice, transparent feel to the print) on natural Kitakata paper, and the image size (for all of them) is about 3 1/5"x 5".

The second print is the same, with a little bit of darker ink rolled onto the body & tips of the wings.

The last print is the darker ink on Thai Chiri Kozo paper which has then been wet-mounted onto grey Rising Stonehenge.

While the photos really don't do the images justice (they flatten the texture and sheen of the papers), they give you at least some idea of what the print looks like. I am particularly happy with the print on the Thai Chiri Kozo - that really helps the moth to hide out on the paper, which is exactly what I was hoping for.

As for mounting, I know I didn't do it exactly right, but it has been done with archival media (nori paste), and it looks pretty good (although I screwed up one, darn it). It would be so much easier to do this with a press, but there ya go.