Behind the Scenes - Kitty

I love the look of the plates in progress almost as much as I love the finished prints. I offer a bit of explanation, from my own limited and evolving knowledge of the process. This is in no way a set of instructions!

First Things First

From my preliminary drawing, I did a simple line etching. I left the cat shape blank because I knew I wanted to go back with a black aquatint to make him black.

Aquatint

The next step was to apply an aquatint to the plate. A resin powder is evenly sprinkled over, then melted onto the plate. This forms a textured resist, allowing only some of the acid to get through when placed in the acid bath. But before placing in the acid, I blocked out all of the areas (by painting on the hard ground) except where I wanted it to be dark. (i.e. the fur). The tricky part was getting the whites of the eyes just right so I blocked them out with a green paint pen (which is also resistant to the acid). I also used the paint pen around the edges. Then I used a grease pencil to achieve subtle texture in the fur. The plate was then submerged into the acid bath for a very short time. This produced a fine texture on the exposed part of the plate; this texture holds the ink, creating the black tone of the fur. With varying exposure times and acid strengths. an infinite range of tones can be created.