MA Week 35 - Etching and a different kind of abstract (1)

Reflection on the past two weeks – 11^th July 2016:

Etching and a different kind of abstract (1) 

It’s been a funny old fortnight. I had hoped to get into college to do some more printing on 1^st July, but the Print Room was closed. Just as well as most of the day was taken up with phone calls back and forth to different places as my partner’s Mum has been unwell again, which has taken up quite a lot of time and energy for the past two weeks. 

I said in my post of 27^th June that I wanted to prioritise printing, so I set about learning a bit more about etching into a ground. I found a few youtubes to watch – the ones I particularly learnt from were Edinburgh Printmakers and Middlesex University . I also had a good look at the Printmaking Handbook on Etching (Gale, 2006). This resulted in a basic understanding of what I needed to do, 1½ pages of notes, and a desire to get going.

 

Etching ruminations

Mike in the Print Room had very kindly said he would walk me through the process on the afternoon of 7^th July. When I got there, he’d found some old plates that had already had soft ground applied, and we worked on these first in a kind of Blue Peter “here’s one I prepared earlier” way. At Mike’s suggestion I rolled one through the press with a piece of hessian, which gave a nice texture to work into. Working on the pre-grounded plates meant I could get them in the acid whilst learning how to apply a ground, which I did next, using both soft ground and liquid ground. 

I initially bit two plates, one for 45 minutes and the other for about an hour and 10 minutes. The next day I engraved and bit three smaller plates, two soft ground and one liquid ground. I bit the liquid ground and one soft ground for 45 minutes, and the other soft ground for 1 hour 15 minutes. Sadly it wasn’t enough for either of the soft ground plates. When I checked them they seemed to have a groove in them, but when I cleaned them, it was barely there and they had been marked rather than etched. 

When I printed the two bigger plates from the day before, these were also very faint, despite Mike cranking up the pressure on the press. We concluded that they probably needed biting for longer. It was a disappointment but that’s how you learn. The little liquid ground plate wasn’t too bad. I was chatting about the process with a colleague who can remember a lot more Chemistry than I can (despite me having a degree in it) and we concluded that perhaps I had actually scratched the copper on the liquid ground one as there is less ground to mark into. That would open up a groove in the copper before the biting starts, so possibly allowing the acid to get into it better.

 

Soft ground plate (top) and liquid ground plate (bottom). These are fainter than the photo shows.

Anyway I really enjoyed the process and want to have another go. Ideally I need to do some tiny test plates and bite them for different lengths of time. I don’t know when I’ll be able to do this as I won’t get into the print room this week and I am becoming conscious of the deadline in a month’s time. Also, I guess it would be better to do this when a fresh batch of acid has just been added into the bath (seems pointless to do it just before changing the acid). So that’s added to the to-do list.