Printmaking Week 8 - Aquatint , Develop Your Drawing Week 7

 I was really pleased  with  the effect of aquatint , it  looks a bit like my original watercolours of Fleet mudflats.  I still need to work out  how to disguise the accidental  marks - maybe some drypoint?

  On a scanned copy of my etching  I used some    grey Pitt pens to   colour in areas with 2 different  tones. Then using etching stop-out varnish ( as sticky bituminous  mixture)  on my plate I painted the areas that would  be reserved as white, a counter-intuitive  procedure!

Then donning mask and gloves,  a thin layer of resin was  applied to the plate using aquatint box ( basically a dust cloud of resin! ) I should really have used the stop- out afterwards as it's inflammable and part of the process involves heating the plate from underneath to melt the resin.  





 Then the plate was put in week acid for 15 seconds, more stop-out varnish applied to  light toned areas just etched   and for the darker tone the plate was put in the weak acid for a further 45 seconds.

Then  the stop-out varnish was removed with paraffin ( resulting in this rather nice  effect of the gold of the resin) ) and the  resin removed with methylated spirits. 

 

Then the exciting bit! There was just time to ink up with Prussian blue - I'm getting better at judging how much ink to take off , and put it through the press.  

 

 I'm not sure  I'll want to do etching and aquatint  in  the future,  as it requires access to facilities and there's a lot of processes involved.  But I've gained a whole new respect and insight  into  what goes into an etching and  looked at the prints in the RA summer Exhibition  with a new perspective  on my visit on Wednesday (more in another post)

 

 

The 'Develop your drawing ' class this week  was off-site  around Waterloo Bridge collecting sketches  and information   for a 2 week project  on the theme of Journey.   My sketches really were sketchy but I had a lovely time scribbling .Below are some of the photos I took as a reminder, I'll probably do a bit of playing in Photoshop to develop some ideas for next week.