DIG DEEP

Using a tattoo machine as an etching tool? It needed the boiling imagination of a punk-rocker to come out with such a crazy idea. Dr Lulu doesn’t miss a beat and is already digging deep into his own etching style

- Dr Lulu

The technique that you use to make these etchings is not very conventional, can you explain it to us?

I start from an existing drawing, done by hand on paper or in Photoshop, and I print it, like I would a tattoo. Once the drawing is cleaned up, I put on a slab of transparent Plexiglas which will be used as a mould. Then I take my tattoo machine, usually a rotary—but a coil is fine too for filling—and trace the design. Like for a tattoo, I take thin needles, more or less according to the tracing that I want. I don’t like to throw things away, so I use first the needles which have expired, needles still wrapped but with an expired best-before date.

Does this technique have a name?

Weeeeeeeeeell, no. I don’t find anything that fits, but I don’t know anybody else doing this either. That doesn’t mean he/she doesn’t exist. Everything is possible.

How did you come to distort the tattoo tool?

In the beginning, I was carving with a dry point, a tool that looks like a pen to which has been added a metal pin to make an incision. But this technique is extremely long, at least three times longer than with the tattoo machine and it’s uncomfortable too—it makes a lot of noise. So I asked myself why not use something that makes incisions, in a regular way and that I can master as time goes by. The tattoo machine became obvious.

With the exception of the dry point, did you try other tools ?

I’ve seen everything and I didn’t want to do etching with acid (eau forte) or something else—wood and copper are very fastidious. Etching is an extension of the graphic work that I do. I only do black lines and little points, so I had to find a means to do regular lines without having it be something too perfect, as it is with the dry point.