Howdy! I just realized I haven’t shown any of the prints I’ve been making in my etching class, mainly due to the fact that I kept forgetting to bring them home from school. This one uses a process called sugar lift, where you can use a brush to draw on a copper plate with an ink/sugar mixture. Then you coat your plate with an acid-resisting ground, soak in hot water, and all of your sugary ink lines wash out. After that dries, run your plate through a process called aquatint which essentially creates a textured surface on just the ink lines, which is what gives you the rich black brush strokes, or lighter, depending on the time in the acid. (End BT’s Printmaking 101)

I plan on doing a lot more of this technique for the rest of the semester as it seems like the best way to make the final prints feel more consistent with my regular work. Also, this cowboy is sort of the first thing I’ve shown in a slightly new way of working for me; I’ve been doing a lot of drawings in my sketchbook that go straight to brush, no planning, no pencils, and I’m finding I really like the more confident brush strokes I’m laying down as well as the grotesqueness in some of the figures, resulting from not penciling anything.

Seriously, everybody, do it. This tiny print combines normal line etching and aquatint on the letters and tires.

A happenstance collaboration with my roommate. She threw this tiny copper plate with two crossed feathers into the print studio’s junk plate bin, I found it, recognized it as her style, and added the lettering and the dodo.

This is an aquatint etching of a photocopy transfer of the skull, from the skull wearing a bike helmet poster I posted last week or so. I decided to experiment and started scraping away the aquatint texture…

…until I got to this, step two in the process. I went even further, making the lettering and the skyline crown pop a bit more, which I will show once it’s back from the teacher.

If anyone might be interested in buying any of these prints, let me know, I should get around to printing a small edition of each one soon.

Tags :: Print, Schoolwork