For the photography project in the light room, I needed to photograph something.  So I built the trolley I did various prints of.  I'm not a carpenter so this was fairly new to me!

I photocopied some of the prints to give them a distorted look.  This was just an experiment.

I stuck primarily to etching as my practice evolves mostly from drawing.  I took the same images and did etchings without aquatint to see how they would compare to the ones with tonal values.

I came across an artist called Vince Low who does scribble portraits of various celebrities and I wanted to encorporate that type of gestural drawing into my practice.  I had an idea to write discrimination backwards on an ambulance in order to attack the various problems with Irish healthcare concerning the poor.  I did a plate of this using this scribble style.

For the last prints, I left them in the acid for about 20 minutes and I drew with a zig posterman marker.  Now I wanted to try new things.  I started painting with Bitumen to get a painterly print.  I also had an idea to attach a hospital bed to a drip to give off the impression that the Irish healthcare system is sick.  Here are the experimental prints.

I kept this in the acid for about 15 minutes.  I rocked the plate back and forth to blend the tones together.

I put this in the acid on 3 separate occasions to get 3 tones.  I wanted to blend them together.

Here're some similar experiments I left out.

As time went on we learned about aquatint and getting different tonal values.  In the beginning I stuck to one whole colour for each print, focusing on just the trolley.  They're just experiments to get familiar with the process so they're not very good!

I stuck mainly to red and black as these suited the theme I was going for.

These photograms paved the way for how I'd continue to work over the next few weeks.  I wanted to give off the idea of the discomfort of sleeping on a trolley so I combined it with the medieval torture device called the Iron Maiden which looked like this.

It was likely fictional but I can't imagine anything less comfortable than this thing!  Here're the photograms I did.  I included characters based off the stories I found like the elderly woman, the man who died and others.

This one was an experiment to see how they would look all together.

This style of drawing was heavily influenced by Kathe Kollwitz as I wanted to find the most effective way of portraying the morbidity of the situation.  She does this quite well.