All things Day of the Dead

The fat lady has sung and it is done. A shrine to Skeletons, Marigolds, Jalapenos, and Tequila. As I was reading about Día de los Muertos these things were the re-occurring theme. Now, the Jalapenos are used to cook things left at the graves of loved ones passed, but I love them all by themselves, so they get a special place up front. By the way. Never NEVER taunt the chef by saying something stupid like "This isn't even close to hot enough." Oddly enough this was NOT the direction I was thinking of going originally, however the more reading I did the more I was drawn to this theme. Yet another huge learning project for me. Ferric Chloride for some reason hates me. Each piece of copper took different times to etch. The main image took 55 minutes and has a nice deep etch. Each of the side bits took times varying from 60 min to almost 80 and on top of that the 80 etch still isn't that deep. BUT WAIT! Before you suggest that I not reuse etchant, I didn't. This was fresh stuff and the copper had been cleaned and sanded lightly before the resist image was put on. I have no idea what happened to that one... There is another thing as well. Getting the images onto the copper.... Good god almighty what a pain in the arse!!! I started by illustrating the main image into my sketchbook. I scanned it and photoshop touched it up a little. Printed it out on my Brother laser printer, taped it to the copper at the corners, applied acetone and....AND....AND....nothing. Only the slightest of ink shown on my copper. I was so pumped for this. Jazzed and excited even. To be able to illustrate stuff, print it off and etch it into metal just sounded SO cool! To get absolutely nothing was ... Well, you know when While E Coyote is in a hot air balloon with goodies to drop on Roadrunner, then something pops the balloon. He is frozen in mid air till he processes what just happened and then he falls to his doom. Kinda felt like that. So after my big let down there I tried Office Max. They printed it off for me. (I was hoping it was an ink thing) Well it wasn't. I received precisely 2% more ink off of that print. 2% more than .5% sucks, however it was enough for me to see the image. So with my deadline approaching I got down to what I knew needed to be done. Hand inking the whole dang thing. I grabbed 3 different sized sharpies and went to town. So the main image has an "original" to it. The rest were inked right onto the copper and are one offs that can't be duplicated. You can imagine my stress when I put those into the etchant. If one came out with a bubble or something bad I got to start all over again. Well fate loved me that day. I had no problems at all. The door was hand cut with my jewelers saw and putting the hinges on was fun. I ended up using a small pen drill and drilling pilot holes. Then I cut the screws down by half. I am very happy with how this turned out and also quite happy to be done with it. lol