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Color etching re-visited
My goodness, it’s been a long time since I’ve made a print…thanks to some carpal tunnel issues in my right wrist! Despite the discomfort, I decided to start the New Year by taking Rachel Heberling’s “Advanced Color Etching” class at Tiger Lily Press. It was a fun class and just what I needed to get going again. I haven’t done a color etching in decades, especially one that turned out to be as complicated as I made this one. Two plates, seven colors, plus chine colle. If that wasn’t bad enough, I invested in loads of Charbonnel “Aqua Wash” water soluble color etching ink so that I could continue printing at home without the use of solvents. Water soluble etching inks have a very different ‘feel’ than oil based inks, and will probably take me a while to understand how to use them properly.
Using only two plates, and multiple colors, makes for tedious application of the ink.
The Aqua Wash ink is quite nice to use, but some of the colors leave
a lot of plate tone. Here I’m using a wet Q-Tip to
spot wipe the prussian blue on plate #2.
The background on plate #2 has been inked and is carefully wiped to avoid dragging the
ink back into the already finished center of the image.
This technique is referred to as “a la poupee”.
French for “doll”, since the little ink daubers are supposed to resemble
dolls heads. My daubers look like squashed doll heads!
So here is the print after many, many problems along the way. I wouldn’t call it ‘done’,
it was difficult to print, and I only managed to get
two decent proofs. So it’s going to be put on the back burner,
and perhaps I’ll come back to at a later date to fiddle with it some more.
Comments Off on Color etching re-visited
11 Feb 2013
