What can I say, I was mad.

I came across this in my paper portfolio; I did this literally as a one-day etching sketch (Etch-A-Sketch?) on July 8th, 2011 — the morning the last Shuttle Atlantis launched.

It's a 3"x5" plate with a deep, 25-minute open-bite etch around the figure. The lady is wearing a live chicken for a hat, as one does; a concept freely filched from astounding (and often hilarious) artist Omar Rayyan's earlier work. (I'm kicking myself for not buying one of the bird-hat paintings from him back at the WorldCon in 2001 when I had the chance, but I have two other original watercolors of his now that I treasure that I bought from him at IlluxCon '09.)

This plate has only a total of four hours into it and was drawn directly into the ground with no preliminary sketch or transfer, mostly using the point of a curved, steel burnishing tool. Who says I can't work fast when I want to...?

The lettering behind her is my angry rant about the sloppy end of the manned American space program I grew up with near Cape Canaveral (I was born a few months before Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 flight), at least as we know it now. It doesn't matter what the text says; it's written directly into the ground, so it's backwards and kind of stream-of-consciousness-ranty and contains various cuss words. Looks agreeably important & mysterious, though, dunnit? ;-)

I kind of like this weird little print to commemorate that morning. Strange day, indeed.