DIG DEEP
Skin Deep|Issue 308
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
DIG DEEP

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.

This story is from the Issue 308 edition of Skin Deep.

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This story is from the Issue 308 edition of Skin Deep.

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