Developing an aquatint etching at Uclan

To start this process I chose my image, which is based on a place called Skelton nr Penrith in North Cumbria. I made some drawings of elements of my reference photographs on drafting film. When I cam to etch the plate, I simply turned the drawing over. This means that I etch the design back to front so it comes out the right way when printed.

referring to my original drawing I finished scratching through the layer of wax resist with an etching needle creating lines in the wax where I wanted there to be an etched line. During this process wax is often accidental brushed off or scratched off. However I wanted there to be some accidental and random marks on the final etching so I left many of them on the plate. There were some larger less desirable scratches which I did remove however by simply painting stopping-out varnish over them before the etching process.

this represents the end of the first stage of etching. When I was happy with all the lines and marks scratched through the wax resist the plate was introduced into a bath of copper sulphate solution to begin the safer etching process. I watched the etching taking place carefully. For this deep line etch the plate was in the solution for 40 mins. I inspected the line using an opticians magnifier and I could see the line was nice and deep and evenly bitten. I cleaned off the wax resist in a bath of strip wash and this is how the plate looked.

I covered the plate in an acrylic aquatint spray using an airbrush. I then stopped out the light middle section of the plate using acrylic stop-out varnish. I then introduced the plate to the copper sulphate solution for 30 seconds. Stopped out the rest of the sky, another minute in the solution, stopped out the foreground', another 2 and a half minutes in the solution to achieve the final dark grey in for the horizon. I am happy with how the etching turned out but it was not entirely how I predicted. There was far more texture in the lighter tones than I had envisaged, but I like that. It will be interesting to see the different effects I can get with subsequent prints from his plate by inking and wiping it differently.