Sadaf Mirza if you go to my website www.printmakingstudio.co.uk you will find my shop where you can order my safer etching ground BIG. There are several other distributors who sell it too. I have many other video demos you can watch where you will find the different ways of making an etching.
Very very cool. Couldn’t you straight up mezzo tint with just sandpaper directly on the plate with no ground? I’m going to give it a shot but I love how you stacked sandpaper to create gradual pressure. This is great stuff. The first mezzotint i did was with a zippo lighter steel rolled around the surface and then I burnished with whatever i could and it came out great for a first try. So this is incredible. I doubt i’ll have access to an aquatint box any time soon and it sounds like a huge hassle compared to your sandpaper technique and like i said, i will try it with and without ground. I find I can use plain sheets of aluminum sheetmetal and get a decent print while experimenting. Obviously copper is much tougher and a more satisfying metal all around but I am going to got try your sandpaper grading technique directly onto the metal and with ground to see what works better. Thanks for making this.
Hi Andrew I love the videos . One correction though Martin Lewis was an Australian who did a lot of good work in the US. He came from Cstlelmaine Melbourne ,Victoria .
Hi Brian, But of course your quite right, my error, he was indeed born in Australia but spent most of his life in USA. I think he also spent some time in Japan. Nevertheless he was the most amazingly talented artist.
Thanks Andrew. One question - the grades of emery paper - what does 500, 120 etc mean? Do you mean the European P500, P120 etc or are you using the US (CAMI) version? (see Wikipedia 'Sandpaper').
Hello Andrew! Thank you very much for this tutorial, I have some questions: What kind of cover does the copper plate have? Would this process work in iron? As the rest of the image is achieved by bruising and in iron is difficult to achieve, it occurs to me that I could try to re-paint the drawing, to block the granulate and thus to preserve white and gray in sussive dives (like traditional aquatint) Where I live is cheaper and easier to get iron than copper, and in my faculty we work with that material. I would be interested to propose this technique in class.
I think one of the unique properties of BIG is that it can stand this kind of punishment without breaking down. You can purchase BIG from many distributors. And yes it’s a far safer option.
To be honest Michael I don’t know because I haven’t tried. But my suspicions would be that a traditional hard ground wouldn’t stand the punishment of so many holes pressed into it. And other acrylic hard grounds are to hard. I guess you will just have to use BIG😁
