etching – 05-02-17

Today I carried out the etching workshop. I had previously done etching during my art foundation but it was using cardboard rather than metal, but I was introduced to chine-colle and a lot of the steps were the same. The skills I picked up were to do with hard and soft ground, how to apply them and etch into them, and what different textures I can produce on each of the grounds. Also the process of prepping and putting the plate in acid and how to correctly clean off the acid to show the finished etch.

I decided to create 2 plates to tie in with my explain project. Firstly with hard ground I created a background for one of my pages. Secondly I used the soft ground to do an outline drawing of ice cube. I wasn’t mega happy about the outcomes, I feel I could have created something a lot nicer but it was interesting to learn from my mistakes. The soft ground is extremely easy to mark, so I ended up having a lot of weird marks that I hadn’t planned on my plate which ended up on my plate.

I really enjoyed the process of etching, the speed of it really appeals to me. Here is an image of one of my final plates.