After numerous failures I'm finally getting the hang of bromoil. Over the weekend all the planets aligned and my matrix worked, I got the ink to the right consistency & my brush technique worked. :)
If it had not worked this time I think I probably would have given up and waited for workshop to come around. I'll probably still take a workshop, but at least I can keep at it in the meantime.
Sarah, I feel like I'm still kludging my matrix to work. When I initially ink, it seems the ink wants to stick to the highlights and NOT to the shadows. I just keeping working it until the whole thing is all ink, no image. Then a clean hard brayer, very fast and the ink lifts right off the highlights. I give it another soak at this point and then it seems to cooperate and I re-ink everything and the various brush strokes actually work the way I have read they should. Then I get to have fun.
Hope your planets align soon, it is very frustrating and it takes a lot of work to get to a failure.