![]() Well, it can be as simple a case as using varnish - commonly referred to as ‘stop-out varnish’ - to ‘stop out’ those parts of the plate that you don’t want the acid to bite into.īy sometimes stopping out certain areas for certain stages of the biting of your plate, and sometimes not, you can further expand the astounding range of visual effects the aquatint process makes possible in your prints. I mentioned above, the idea of only exposing certain parts of your plate to the acid at a given time, and you might be wondering how, exactly, you do that. ![]() If you have ever gazed at etchings on paper that evidently do not depend solely on etched lines - due to areas of them more closely resembling watercolour drawings or wash drawings - and wished to achieve the same effects in your own works, aquatint is something you ought to know about. What’s the point of pursuing this technique? Between 35% and 65% coverage should give you the results you need. It is inside this box that a cloud of rosin is made, with the plate subsequently placed inside the box and left there until it is entirely and evenly coated with dust. While it’s by no means the only type of aquatint, the most common type is powdered rosin, which is normally applied using an aquatint box. The acid then eats into the metal surrounding the particles, to make possible the kind of tonal effect in the final print that the artist would not be able to achieve by depending on etched lines alone. Such acid-resist is melted slightly onto the plate by heating, before the plate is immersed in an acid bath, as is the case in etching. Photo by Monica Macdonald Ralph (via ArtWeb)Īquatint departs from etching, though, in that it entails the plate being covered with a porous ground of fine articles of acid-resistant material. In other words, they both work through the incision of a design or image onto the plate surface, with this incised design or sunken area then holding the ink that is subsequently transferred onto paper when the plate is put through the printing press. The most obvious thing that aquatint and etching have in common is that they both belong to the intaglio family of printmaking techniques. This, in turn, lends itself to very different results on the paper – from the lightest greys to the deepest blacks, depending on what tones and textures the artist is attempting to achieve. However, while etching is generally considered to be about the production of incised lines in a metal plate - with these lines then holding the ink that allows an image to be printed on paper - aquatint is all about creating more tonal and ‘textured’ areas in a final print. Aquatint, in a nutshell, is an intaglio printmaking technique, closely related to etching, that enables the creation of an extremely wide range of tonal effects.
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