Kaleidoscope Etch Art Creations: Butterflies and More

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Caridad de una muger” (A Woman’s Charity, 1810-1820), Francisco Goya. Etching, lavis, burin, and burnisher on wove paper. Welcome to the Office of Environmental Health and Safety | Office of Environmental Health and Safety". Web.princeton.edu. Archived from the original on 2012-08-26 . Retrieved 2015-08-11. Art of the first cities: the third millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2003. pp.395–396.

Peter Farb, Man's Rise to Civilization (1978) p.205, citing Emil Walter Haury, The Hohokam: Desert Farmers and Craftsmen (1976) Draw on the etch-art panels with the stylus to uncover the bright foil or patterns underneath, making your creations burst with life! While the live version offers an ability to interact with the Art Teacher as well as other Art Learners,Each involved crafting an image on a metal plate, inking the plate, and running the plate and paper through a printing press. During Rembrandt’s time, there were three basic techniques that 17 th-century artists commonly used to create prints— copper engraving, drypoint, and etching. Hammett, Dashiell, The Thin Man, (1934) in Five Complete Novels, New York: Avanel Books, 1980, p.592. The switch to copper plates was probably made in Italy, [14] and thereafter etching soon came to challenge engraving as the most popular medium for artists in printmaking. Its great advantage was that, unlike engraving where the difficult technique for using the burin requires special skill in metalworking, the basic technique for creating the image on the plate in etching is relatively easy to learn for an artist trained in drawing. On the other hand, the handling of the ground and acid need skill and experience, and are not without health and safety risks, as well as the risk of a ruined plate.

The traditional soft ground, requiring solvents for removal from the plate, is replaced with water-based relief printing ink. The ink receives impressions like traditional soft ground, resists the ferric chloride etchant, yet can be cleaned up with warm water and either soda ash solution or ammonia.

Designs in a syrupy solution of sugar or Camp Coffee are painted onto the metal surface prior to it being coated in a liquid etching ground or 'stop out' varnish. When the plate is placed in hot water the sugar dissolves, leaving the image. The plate can then be etched. Growing concerns about the health effects of acids and solvents [19] [20] led to the development of less toxic etching methods [21] in the late 20th century. An early innovation was the use of floor wax as a hard ground for coating the plate. Others, such as printmakers Mark Zaffron and Keith Howard, developed systems using acrylic polymers as a ground and ferric chloride for etching. The polymers are removed with sodium carbonate (washing soda) solution, rather than solvents. When used for etching, ferric chloride does not produce a corrosive gas, as acids do, thus eliminating another danger of traditional etching. A waxy acid-resist, known as a ground, is applied to a metal plate, most often copper or zinc but steel plate is another medium with different qualities. There are two common types of ground: hard ground and soft ground. Anodic etching has been used in industrial processes for over a century. The etching power is a source of direct current. The item to be etched (anode) is connected to its positive pole. A receiver plate (cathode) is connected to its negative pole. Both, spaced slightly apart, are immersed in a suitable aqueous solution of a suitable electrolyte. The current pushes the metal out from the anode into solution and deposits it as metal on the cathode. Shortly before 1990, two groups working independently [22] [23] developed different ways of applying it to creating intaglio printing plates. The process as applied to printmaking is believed to have been invented by Daniel Hopfer ( c. 1470–1536) of Augsburg, Germany. Hopfer was a craftsman who decorated armour in this way, and applied the method to printmaking, using iron plates (many of which still exist). Apart from his prints, there are two proven examples of his work on armour: a shield from 1536 now in the Real Armeria of Madrid and a sword in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum of Nuremberg. An Augsburg horse armour in the German Historical Museum, Berlin, dating to between 1512 and 1515, is decorated with motifs from Hopfer's etchings and woodcuts, but this is no evidence that Hopfer himself worked on it, as his decorative prints were largely produced as patterns for other craftsmen in various media. The oldest dated etching is by Albrecht Dürer in 1515, although he returned to engraving after six etchings instead of developing the craft. [13]

You can see innovative examples of etching in the works of master artists like Rembrandt van Rijn, Albrecht Dürer, and Francisco Goya. However, even if you’re familiar with the term “etching,” you might not know exactly what the process involves. With that in mind, we’ve put together this beginner’s introduction to etching, showing how artistic etchings are made. Our etching guide is illustrated by some visual aids we recorded while visiting Amsterdam’s remarkable Rembrandt House Museum a few years ago.Behr, Marion; Behr, Omri (1993), "Etching and Tone Creation Using Low-Voltage Anodic Electrolysis", Leonardo, 26 (#1): 53–, doi: 10.2307/1575781, JSTOR 1575781, S2CID 100716855 The plate is removed from the acid and washed over with water to remove the acid. The ground is removed with a solvent such as turpentine. Turpentine is often removed from the plate using methylated spirits since turpentine is greasy and can affect the application of ink and the printing of the plate. It was a complex and involved process, but it did allow artists to craft and mass-produce prints of staggering clarity and quality.

Etching was used for decorating metal from the fourteenth century, but was probably not used for printmaking much before the early sixteenth century. Since then many etching techniques have been developed, which are often used in conjunction with each other: soft-ground etching uses a non-drying resist or ground, to produce softer lines; spit bite involves painting or splashing acid onto the plate; open bite in which areas of the plate are exposed to acid with no resist; photo-etching (also called photogravure or heliogravue) is produced by coating the printing plate with a light sensitive acid-resist ground and then exposing this to light to reproduce a photographic image. Foul biting results from accidental or unintentional erosion of the acid resist. The ground can also be applied in a fine mist, using powdered rosin or spraypaint. This process is called aquatint, and allows for the creation of tones, shadows, and solid areas of color. After the ground has hardened the artist "smokes" the plate, classically with 3 beeswax tapers, applying the flame to the plate to darken the ground and make it easier to see what parts of the plate are exposed. Smoking not only darkens the plate but adds a small amount of wax. Afterwards the artist uses a sharp tool to scratch into the ground, exposing the metal. Copper engraving is the oldest technique and was very popular during the Renaissance. As the name suggests, it involves carving an image directly onto a copper plate. It could be quite difficult and involved a certain degree of metal-working skill. Aquatint is a variation giving only tone rather than lines when printed. Particulate resin is evenly distributed on all or parts of the plate, then heated to form a screen ground of uniform, but less than perfect, density. After etching, any exposed surface will result in a roughened (i.e., darkened) surface. Areas that are to be light in the final print are protected by varnishing between acid baths. Successive turns of varnishing and placing the plate in acid create areas of tone difficult or impossible to achieve by drawing through a wax ground.German master Daniel Hopfer invented the etched stroke technique at the beginning of the 16th century. The innovation delighted the artists-engravers: the speed of the plate processing, accurate reproduction of hand movements, clarity and subtlety of the stroke, the 500 sheets print run without loss of image quality made the etching graphics popular for five centuries. The plate is then completely submerged in a solution that eats away at the exposed metal. ferric chloride may be used for etching copper or zinc plates, whereas nitric acid may be used for etching zinc or steel plates. Typical solutions are 1 part FeCl 3 to 1 part water and 1 part nitric to 3 parts water. The strength of the acid determines the speed of the etching process. Soft ground also comes in liquid form and is allowed to dry but it does not dry hard like hard ground and is impressionable. After the soft ground has dried the printmaker may apply materials such as leaves, objects, hand prints and so on which will penetrate the soft ground and expose the plate underneath. Etchings have been hugely influential in art history, particularly in the development of printmaking. Traditional intaglio printmaking methods, their health hazards, new non-toxic substitutes". Greenart.info. 2013-03-14 . Retrieved 2015-08-11.