I showed Roger my drawing of the owl tea party, he said for an image that size the copper will be quite expensive. As it is a process you can easily do wrong I decided to just draw one of the owls on their own as it will cost a lot less in copper.
In etching you can't have large areas of inked areas as it all falls out when putting it through the press. Some parts of my drawing (shaded parts) will be too large for etching.
Copper prices -
A6 - £1.29
A5 - £2.57
A4 - £5.14
A3 - £10.28
A2- £20.56
I didn't realise that the etching process was so different from screen printing, for some reason I thought you exposed the copper to the image you wanted. When you actually scratch your image into the copper, whoops! Which means all the detail that I put into my owl tea party was slightly pointless, but i can still use it for reference.
The process (with some of my photos) -
- cut copper to size
- sand the copper
- wash under the tap and use the yellow sponge, then blot dry.
- coat with floor varnish with black ink (use red tray and rest it on a block)
- drag the excess off onto spare paper
- leave to dry in drying room for about 10mins
- get a pointy stick and scratch the image into the copper. (Remember that whatever you scratch will be backwards once printed, if it needs to be a certain way trace original drawing and work from the tracing instead)
(this was a tested plate)
(I drew on a rough outline with a marker first. I wish that I hadn't because it is much harder to scratch the top layer off when going through the sticky ink as well)
- face the copper down on a newspaper book, then tape the entire back of the copper and overlap onto the newspaper.
- with a scalpal cut around the edges as close as possible.
- put on an etching hook and place into the tank of ferric chloride. (make sure the switch is on so it's bubbling)
( the amount of time you leave your copper in here depends on how old the solution is. It last up to one year. The newer the solution the less time it needs, new 15mins - old 45mins)
- I left mine for 25mins.
- Take out and let the remains drip back into the tub.
- Shake it about in the tub of water
- Put in the end container (caustic soda/ stripper) for ten minutes.
- After ten minutes put gloves on and wash the plate in the sink under running water and wipe with the blue sponge.
- get the ink from one of the swidgy paint guns (The ink is much thicker than ink used for other prints) put a small amount of ink on the table and using a small piece of card transfer it into the copper. Move the ink around in all different directions. Pull any extra ink off and back onto the table.
- get small pieces of tissue paper and run them around the plate until you get all excess ink off.
- You have to prepare wetted paper to print on (just put paper in a tub of water, then roll out the excess water)
- place the copper plate on a piece of waste paper, on the press, face up. Put a piece of tissue over that, then put all the press rollers over the top.
- Run the print through the press then remove all excess paper and leave the print to dry.
I made three prints from this first trial. The first was very inky, I left too much ink around the edges of the print.
The next one I made I removed as much ink as I could from all parts of the copper before putting it through the press. This one worked much better (although the photo I took is rubbish)
I then tried to put the print through the press again without re applying the ink.
This did not work at all. The photo doesn't look as bad as the print does. The print itself is very poor, the ink isn't consistent across the image and it is very pale. I also didn't dry this paper well enough which is why it had creased and pulled as the roller went across it.
I really enjoyed the etching process. I am going in again at their next drop in point (Monday) so that I can try aqua tint and make different plates.
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