A Tour of the Etching Process
|
I begin from a sketch in my drawing tablet of the shoreline of Avalanche Lake. Giant boulders balance and look as if their ready to crash into the water, spruce trees jut up wherever they find a foothold amongst the rocks. The cliffs of Mt. Colden loom out of the lake on the opposite shore. The edges of a zinc plate are filed so that when the plate is printed the pressure of the press won't rip into a sharp edge and rip the paper. I have made a quick line drawing of the scene in reverse and now scratch the image into the zinc plate to use as guidelines Sometimes just a quick glance tells me that "there is an etching", or even a sentence or phrase will give me an idea for an image. The etching plate is coated with 'hard ground', asphaltum and wax. It is acid resistant but allows me to draw through it's surface to the metal below. The exposed metal is put into a nitric acid bath, which etches into the plate, wherever I've drawn. The darkest areas are drawn first and therefore exposed to the acid the longest and are the deepest cuts, holding the most ink. Then I pull my first proof. I spread ink over the plate and progressively wipe the plate clean,
beginning my wipe with a dirty cheesecloth and ending the final wipe
with a smooth piece of newsprint. My next process is called aquatinting, most of my plates goes through this half tone process. Aquatint is ground up very fine pine rosin that I fill a small bag with and sprinkle into the top of a five foot tall home made box. I let the heavy particles fall to the bottom and then insert my plate on a shelf partway up from the base. The fine particles of rosin dust fill my plate and then I heat them to melting on a hot plate and let them cool. Now I have thousands of tiny acid resistant dots on my plate. I begin masking out areas that will be lighter in tone and the darker sections get to be in the nitric acid for a longer period of time and therefore will hold more ink eventually. |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
||||||
 |
I guess what I love most about doing etchings is the element of the unknown. I never really know until I take my proofs what I have etched into the metal, and the fascination never ends when I examine a plate up close and look at all the tiny grooves I've made. When I see just a small part of the plate that way you realize how important each little etched dot on the plate is to the whole |
|
 Thanks for checking out... What I Love To Do! |
