Etching

Etching Workshop

Here is a quick guide as to how to continue with your etching plate once you have drawn on your artwork, so that it can be ready for printing.

• Carefully attach it to the side of the acid bath, so that the copper plate is submerged using liberal amounts of brown tape, as once it fall off it cannot be saved.
• Leave it in the bath for about half an hour to an hour, depending on how strong you want your line. 
• Rinse with cold water.
• Dry with blotting paper/newsprint.
• Remove the wax with turpentine.
• Good to go for printing once dry!

Applying the wax to the fresh and buffered copper plates, this is done using heat:

Here was my plate, with my artwork etched in and once it had been in the acid bath for an hour:

Here are my completed prints, I chose a burnt umber ink to print them with:

It was printed on the end of another two, hence why half appears not to have printed, I quite like this effect though, it helps make it look slightly less flat.

• As a Process I found this really exciting, and think that the quality of line that it can produce will suit me and my way of working. 
• The image itself isn't particularly strong, there is some fun and interesting going on though.
• It is important to have a very clear resolved image to etch and use as reference, however I was quite experimental with the beard and used only very loose imagery to create it, and the freedom of that perhaps brought out some of my better line qualities - them being freer and slightly more expressive came out quite nicely. (Well actually what I did was use some little snippets of octopus tentacle imagery - from my store of sea life pictures that I have been working from. So perhaps I can bear this in mind and try it again in the future)