I’ve been desperately trying to get back to my ‘One & Twenty’ routine.  OK, hardly a routine, but I’d like it to be.  The idea is that I look at something for one minute (really trying to examine the image in detail) then spend twenty minutes drawing it.  I don’t have a lot of time so this seems like a good way to at least get a little drawing done.

I went to the beach and wandered along the front exploring the rock-pools.

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I sat down here:

Twenty minutes later I’d come up with this:

I went home and continued, tracing some parts and using ‘artistic licence’ to move a few bits around slightly to make a better composition for the plate size I intended to print.:

The design was scanned, reversed, traced onto tissue paper and applied to a zinc plate using soft ground etching.  That is: heated soft wax spread and cooled on the plate surface.  The traced design is placed over this and lightly drawn over.  Once finished, the tissue is removed, taking with it some of the still-tacky wax where the pressure had been applied.  The plate is then immersed in nitric acid and, where the wax has been taken away, the plate etches.

Not a bad first print.  However, the sedimentary rock to the right isn’t defined enough to sit forward in the composition, so I applied a hard ground over the plate surface enabling me to etch more areas.  That is: heated hard wax rolled onto the warmed zinc plate and cooled, then scratched into, in selected areas, before immersing in nitric acid again.  The good thing about this is that you can see through the very thin coating of golden wax and so scratch in exactly the right place.  At this stage, I simply added more inclusions into the sedimentary rock.

Stage two will be working with multiple colours and adding a watery effect from a second plate that is currently underway.