Hi everyone, I hope you’re all doing well! This week, I’m going to show you all my final project from my etching course! I know I said I would have some photos of my most recent kiln unloading, but I haven’t been able to set up my mini photo booth to get high-quality ones, so I’m aiming to show you them in my next post! Regardless, I want to show you all my final prints because I’m super happy with them!

For this project, I chose to do another zinc etching because it was my favorite type of etching we did all semester! I also wanted to play around with plate tones, because I really enjoyed how they looked on my lighthouse landscape zinc etching. So, for this piece, I mainly used aquatint to create my image instead of etching lines.

To begin, I etched the few lines in the background. I used aquatint to define everything in the foreground. I had templates and planning pages to make the process a bit smoother, but it still took a while to get everything how I wanted. Once I got all of my tones on the plate, I etched it in acid for a final time. Then I was ready to clean off the plate and make my first print! Here are a couple process photos

I always do my first print in black, so I did the same with this project. However, the results didn’t turn out as well as I wanted them to. The darker tones got lost within each other and it was difficult to tell what the image was. So, I printed it a couple more times wiping more ink off each time, but still wasn’t thrilled. Instead of giving up on it, I tried to print it with another color of ink. I’m super happy I did this because I think it turned out great! It’s much easier to see what is going on in the image, and the contrast of the background and foreground is super interesting. I’m so happy with these results! I’m excited to experiment more next semester because I’ll be taking another printmaking course!

Well that’s all I have for this week. I’m excited to share more soon! Thank you all for reading and stay creative 🙂

-Jenna