Print series 1

Source material as inspiration:
I chose this picture of bone calcification and zoomed into the detail.

Drawing the design:
After several small sketches I redrew my design to full size.

Transferring the image:
A zinc sheet was painted with liquid hard ground.  First time I’ve used this as I’ve only had access to grounds in block form before.  Melbourne Etching Supplies tells us:

Zinc plate with drying hard ground

The ground was left to dry.

Designs were traced onto the dried ground and, using a fine etching tool, lightly scrapped through the ground.  The plates were then immersed in a copper sulphate solution (Nik Semenoff recipe) which corroded the exposed areas of the zinc plate, so creating an intaglio etching into the surface.

The plates were cleaned and inked for an initial proof print.

Printing the components:

Great outcome, despite the slight imperfection on the design outline, top left.  If the hard ground resist isn’t thick enough and a brush stroke is evident it will etch, and that’s what happened here.  I have to live with this.

I cut a piece of .5mm clear PVC film (acetate) into 3 pieces and used 2 of them to add an underlayer to the print.

Using a diamond-tipped etching tool I scratched a design into a second set of PVC sections and reprinted.

Using some builders scrim I created a pattern in a similar way to my recent Connections project method and continued to experiment.  Here are some of the better results:

Very subtle patterning from the embossed scrim on the left of the photo but an attractive outcome.

Above is part of the process to build the print.  Obviously, the orientation of the piece is affected by the direction the press travels and each end of the paper has the potential to be trapped under the roller while the next acetate or zinc plate is put in place, thereby ensuring correct registration.

This is probably my best multi-layer print.  However my preference leans towards the first plain black proof print, the black print with the blue edging and this final print prior to adding the blue layer.  I like the idea of stopping before adding the final zinc plate.