I was experimenting with etching last Friday. Well, maybe 'experimenting' was the wrong word, I was still learning about the technique and still stuck on the basics. I was wondering what the illustrations I did for The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories would look like if reproduced with the etching technique, and so I chose the Wolf Alice illustration and proceeded to do just that.
The following prints were done from an etching using soft ground for a soft pencil-mark look. I actually have not used hard ground and I'm not sure what the effect would have been. In any case, I learned about the hand-wipe, which is a way of cleaning the plate to really remove the ink. Etching is a pretty time-consuming (and expensive!) process, but I just really love the end result! I hope to learn about different-coloured inks and sugar lift in my session tomorrow.
