Hello fellow bloggers, I welcome you to my first update in a staggering two years! But, I would like to share with you a current piece I am working on, and it is called "Savannah Rhodes. " The featured image is only a proof. This is not the finished project.
Savannah Rhodes was originally conceived sometime in 2007 or 2008 but it was only in 2010 she was unearthed from obscurity of sketchbooks past and brought to life in printmaking. The concept of Savannah was originally called "Bitch on the Lam" and it it makes reference to a certain cinematic archetype of a beautiful, perhaps deadly, renegade, female driving a convertible. There is another sketch I would like to unite with Savannah Rhodes' story, which involves a place called Blister Field which is a a remote drought stricken community in Blister County, an ambiguously southwestern American rural zone with a strange secret. Alas, this has yet to ever be put together, but for now we have a glimpse into Savannah's life as a vixen with windswept hair and dark sunglasses with a distant, monumental desert landscape in the background.
From a technical stand point, you might like to know that this is my first time ever making a copper plate etching. The process is quite amazing and I will say you never know what it feels like to see your art imbued into rare earth elements until you're cleaning the etching ground off with paint thinner and it comes gleaming back to life with every mark you made intact.
The process begins with a plain copper plate that you must carefully polish and degrease. After that you apply what is called "etching ground" to the plate and make a smooth, even skin of the ground over the surface of the copper plate. Etching ground is some kind of bituminous, waxy substance that can either be applied wet, or melted from a hard form onto a warmed copper plate. Think of it as a protectorate of the smooth surface of the copper plate. When the etching ground sets up for a day or two you may then transfer your art work to the black etching ground with a piece of tracing paper and a bright piece of pastel or chalk. Once you have transferred your drawing and are careful enough to not wipe off the delicate chalk lines, you then begin with the etching needles. The etching needles are very sharp so they cut right through the ground and you have a reasonable control of weight and thickness by choosing your needle size and the pressure and gesture with which you make a given line.
Once you are finished scraping the lines of your artwork into the etching ground, it is then time to go to the acid! I was very afraid of the acid at first because it sounds so diabolical, but no, the acid is your friend because it so beautifully "bites" into the copper you exposed from the etching ground. So, the way metal corrodes, or dissolves is expedited by a catalyst such as acid and in a matter of seconds thin trenches will have been "bitten" away from the surface of your copper plate. The result is rewarding because it is not only amazing to watch the chemistry unfold before your eyes, but also because it is quite beautiful and shiny. Before you dip your plate you must tape the backside of it as to protect it from being bitten as well. You then attach a tail to the back of the plate with tape to enable easy lowering into and lifting out of the acid.
It sounds simple, right? But there is a trick in copper plate etching that garners a wonderful quality and differentiation of line that is nefarious enough to deserve honorable mention. To get that nice variation in line thickness, you can bite your plate multiple times in different areas by blocking them out with etching ground. For instance, here on Savannah, the background, middle ground and foreground all spent individual amounts of time in the acid bath. The background is intended to be distant, so it was only bathed in acid for 12 minutes. Then the plate was removed from the acid, neutralized and washed. Then the entire background of the piece was blotted out with etching ground again and this time the rest of the plate (the foreground and the middle ground) received another 15-20 minutes in the acid. So, in order to make Savannah's details pop out it required a third blot out with the acid bath, this time covering the car (middleground) and the background as to not expose themk to the acid. Savannah's figure was then etched in for another 20 minutes. The breakdown happens like this: The Background got 12 minutes, the middle ground got 32 minutes and the figure got 52 minutes all together. Imagine the possibilities with your own artwork if you were to ever try this!
Another technique in copper plate etching is called "aquatint" which is a ground technique that uses spray paint to ground the etching plate. Here on Savannah, the aquatint was most extensively used on the body of the car and her sunglasses. As you can see, an impossible-with-the-stylus cloudy effect is achieved by the misty, smokey quality of the spray paint that grounded the undisturbed copper that was once there. This process involved grounding all of the plate out except for the car and sunglasses, and delicately sweeping puffs of spraypaint over the targeted areas (the glasses and the car body.) Once the paint was dry, Savannah's aquatinted car went for a bath in the acid and it garnered a nice, even neutral gray that definitely achieved the look I was hoping for. Copper plate etching really takes guts, I have to tell you, because you do some very indelible things to your work! Right now I am contending with some unintended lines that mysteriously appeared on the plate, but we'll see how all of that goes. I am still learning!
So far Savannah is a work in progress, and the process has been time consuming but with enough practice I definitely see how copper plate etching is a worthwhile endeavor for creating plates. I regret to share with you such a crumby picture of her but I don't have my camera cable with me, so webcam will have to do. I hope if you've ever wondered how to do a copper plate etching this entry shed some light on the subject! I recommend this for anyone who is into printmaking.
-Mike
