Safe (& cheap) etching

I’ve long been put off the idea of etching by the thought of using nitric acid; how do you get hold of it, how do you use it safely, how do you store it and dispose of it safely and responsibly? An unpleasant experience with hydrochloric acid, sold in an unsecured bottle as ‘spirit of salts’, has left me wary of anything labelled ‘acid’. So, the possibility of using an etching liquid that is safe and which gives a clean bite is worth exploring. A saturated solution of common salt in distilled white vinegar sounds too good to be true; however, it works.

Test print, from plate using Rhind's stopout varnish, pencil marks reacting to etch

The metal I have been using is zinc, bought online in A4 size 0.8mm sheets for less than £10 a sheet, including postage. Unlike zinc prepared for printmaking, it is not backed, so you have to prepare this aspect yourself. I have tried car spray paint, nail varnish, Rhind’s stopout varnish, and French polish, this last being the most resistant to the long soak in the etch - as this etch works much slower than nitric acid, the immersion time is much longer, and the masking material has to be able to withstand days of immersion. Car spray paint probably works if you use a primer; nail varnish and stopout varnish both lifted. Firstly, it is essential to have a clean surface – wiping with a clean lint-free cloth with white spirit should be sufficient. French polish is very resilient, but removing it can be a long job; use rubberised gloves, as it’s hard to get off your skin, and toxic through contact.

After seeing the expensive Rhind’s stopout varnish lift off and float away my preferred masking fluid is French polish. For some reason it sits where you put it, unlike the stopout varnish, which bleeds along any rough texture. It also dries very quickly. Cleaning it off a textured surface is an arduous task – after trying a number of methods (soft scrubbing brush, several clean cloths soaked in meths, soaking in meths) the simplest way seems to be to drop small amounts onto the surface, massage it around with a soft brush or the tip of your finger while wearing a thick rubber glove, and then wiping off the hopefully now dissolved French polish: patience and a gentle touch are required. But you can see how well it works as a stopout varnish.

First state

Final state

Print

Following a tip in John Ross and Claire Romano’s Complete Printmaker I used car a couple of passes of car spray paint as the basis for a faux-aquatint; after immersion in the etch it washes away, but stays long enough to create a texture during the early etching process. 

Instead of using hard ground (lost somewhere in the studio) I experimented with beeswax and furniture wax. Rub beeswax onto the degreased plate, lay it on a couple of sheets of absorbent paper, and lay this in a warm oven for ten minutes. The wax melts fairly evenly but can be spread out using a soft brush kept for this purpose. 

As the beeswax is light in colour I tried using furniture wax (hard stick used for repairing scratches to French polished surfaces) but the result is brittle and breaks up as you draw on it with the etching needle. A mixture of the two waxes works, with the benefit that you are able to see your preparatory marks. The value of using a hard roller is that you can feel the wax sitting in a consistent layer – finding a thick layer of wax to get through inhibits drawing, as you have a mess of burrs sitting on your work. 

But if you use a roller you then have a roller covered with wax, which is difficult to get off. I drew the basics of my design on tissue paper, laid this over the plate, and, second time around, very faintly traced them with the etching needle. For the first plate using beeswax I transferred the image from the tissue paper drawing by going over the main lines with a toothed wheel, made from a watch part, but this went through the tissue paper and the wax, showing up on the etched plate and the print. 

With a delicate touch it is possible to use an etching needle and leave a mark which sits on the surface of the wax, not going through to the surface of the plate. The resulting etch after 24 hours was very clean. 

For the second plate I used just beeswax for a second working and etch. Laying on beeswax onto the hot plate and leaving it to cool gently leaves a consistent layer of wax. The good thing about beeswax is that it is hard enough not react to faint touches, but soft enough to allow for edits - to change a mark you can rub the wax back into place with your fingernail, and rework it. The vinegar and salt etch seems to harden the wax – if you use darker wax and scrape it off using a plastic credit-card type card the residue gets pushed into the cuts, enabling you to get a better idea of what the print will look like. I'd go for a darkened beeswax, maybe getting some soot onto the plate first with a candle flame (experiment pending).

As well as the traditional method of drawing on a wax coating I had a go at drawing with a resist directly onto the plate – this could be printed either as relief or intaglio (or both simultaneously, using the varied viscosity method). I used a 6B Staetdler Mars Lumograph pencil, and a chinagraph pencil. The composition of the Staetdler pencils is famously kept secret, but is basically a mix of clay and graphite, while chinagraph pencils are effectively wax. So these should both act as resists. Except that they don’t; counter-intuitively they appear to react to something in the resist, so that the bite is deeper on the areas marked by the pencil. The chinagraph bite is a little more aggressive than the Lumograph, and is harder to work as fine lines. A lot more controlled experiment needed here, but the Lumograph result is very enticing.

Lumograph pencil, etched plate

Print from Lumograph etched plate

Chinagraph pencil etched plate

Here I’ve also used French polish as a painted masking fluid for the edges, as described above. All of these can be combined with burnishing, which I used to pull back the aggressive etch on the chinagraphed plate after it was over-etched to see how far the etch would go (over-etched plate seen here).

Art history is a history of leaps forward in which aesthetics and techniques work together; verisimilitude was dependent on oil paint, the move to the abstract was energised by the discovery of aquatint. I went to art school as a timid linocut artist, and within six months, under the encouraging prompting of Julia Wilson (Julia Little), I was loosening up perspex blocks with paint-stripper and poking decorators’ caulking around to make relief and intaglio blocks and plates. Experimenting loosened up my whole approach to work then, and I feel the same excitement now.  

Studio workshops are available to experiment with these techniques and print the results. Contact me on julianwalker20@gmail.com for details. Studio in Ilford, east London.