Swans

The aim with this plate is to combine it with my soft ground etched plant material from a few weeks ago, which will be printed as a second layer.

I thought it might be interesting to be looking through the plants to a lake or river, perhaps with ducks or swans.  So, using my beginner’s guide to drawing book, I picked up my pencil.

Duck head and shaping was quite good but I wasn’t sure what to do with the folded wings and the book had a good example of a swan and cygnets that I could learn from, so I went with that.  The images were then regrouped whilst being transferred to tracing paper using a 6B pencil.

My zinc plate was prepared as for the soft ground etching: cleaned, degreased and heated on the hotplate to 90 degrees, then hard wax was applied.  It melted the same way as the soft wax and was then rolled to form a smooth covering.  Once cold it dried to a very hard finish and the traced image could be laid on the surface and put through an etching press (reduced pressure) to transfer the graphite to the wax.

Due to a lighting issue my photo didn’t come out well enough so here is a view of a transfer from a classmate (Cynthia).  Using an etching tool I then proceeded to draw into the wax using the transferred lines as a guide.  Detail not transferred was added as the etching evolved.  My design is quite detail-specific and it was surprisingly difficult to see where to etch as the light played over the golden surface of the waxed zinc.

Once complete, the plate was immersed in a nitric acid & water solution (ratio 1:8) for several minutes, checking from time to time and wafting with a feather to remove bubbles, for the design to be bitten into the plate.  When satisfied, I dissolved the remaining wax, cleaned the plate and took a proof print.

An excellent start for this design.  The next stage will be aquatint and masking, followed by water bite and spit bite background sections to create sky and water effects.