Elephant

Description

This is an original etching. It is printed on Rives BFK grey. This is an acid free and archival heavy weight paper. The plate size is: 8 x 16". The Elephant print is a limited edition of 50. It is signed, numbered and dated.

Intaglio is a family of printmaking techniques in which the image is incised into a metal surface. In my case I use zinc plates. I layer my plate with asphaltum, an acid resistive coating. The lines are created by scratching through the acid resist with an etching needle. I use other techniques to achieve different mark~making. Such as: drypoint, aquatint, sugarlift, softgrounds and mezzotint. To print an intaglio plate the surface is covered in thick ink and then rubbed with tarlatan cloth to remove most of the excess. The final smooth wipe is often done with my hand, however often I use old public phone book pages, leaving ink only in the incisions. A damp piece of paper is placed on top and the plate and paper are run through a printing press that, through pressure, transfers the ink from the recesses of the plate to the paper.

The 'umbrella' of printmaking can be rather confusing. Just to clarify: etching is also an intaglio process, differing from engraving in that the lines are eaten into the plate by the action of an acid instead of being gouged with a tool. I happen to use copper sulfate. Which is much less toxic than nitric acid. The printing process is the same as described above.

Added on Aug 20, 2009