Edinburgh Etch...

I finally plucked up the nerve to try some messy, metal plate etchings and discovered....

it really isn't so messy at all!

Here's a linky to the etch info http://www.lawrence.co.uk/fact_sheets/pdfs/Edinburgh%20Etch.pdf

The Ferric Chloride comes in stinky yellow pellets, which dissolve in water and conveniently enough are sold in the same place as the copper PCBs which I used for my plates.

Citric acid is pretty easy to come by, think ebay, and I already had some lurking from some nefarious culinary project.

I mixed this all into a lidded plastic tub, as per the recipe above, and that is all there is to that. 

There's loads of talk and videos regarding vertical aerated etching tanks, which I'm sure are all super but I am impatient and lazy so stuck the back of my plate to a bit of foam with brown packaging tape and made a couple of tape 'handles' on the foam so it would float on the top of the etching fluid and I could easily lift it out.  The theory being that the sludge that occurs in the etched areas will drop to the bottom rather than bung up the fine lines.  Seems to work anyway.

The intial problem I had was finding a satisfactory ground for the plate.  I located a really ancient bottle of 'Klear' floor polish as per most acrylic etching recommendations and had no joy at all with the stuff.  Maybe because it was so ancient (or maybe I was putting it on too thick?) but I found it curled up and looked like birch bark as it dried.  I didn't really want to pay for some Speedball Screen filler and it's not easy to come by anyway.

I'm experimenting still with toner transfers - a distinctly hit and miss affair at the moment.

But the above piece was achieved using....a black sharpie pen.  Not the most elegant solution and would be a horrid idea on large plates but on the 100mm x 80mm I am using it's fine.  I did one layer as best as I could, let it dry overnight then lay on another layer.  It was fairly obvious which areas were not coloured in solidly enough and were going to look a bit crap when it etched but I left them there just to prove to myself. Drew in the design with my trusty knackered compass and floated on the etch gunk for 8 mins.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with this result (design very roughly copied by the way from a book on Piranesi etchings).  I'm gonna try to locate one of the big fat sharpie markers and see how they compare.

So, next things to try are 1. Sharpie magnum marker pen resist and 2. acrylic aquatint since I have aquired an air brush yeehah!