UEL Workshop - Etching

On the 24^th October 2013 six students from the University of East London held a workshop for my A2 Graphics class were we took part in an activity and the classed learned a new technique called Etching that we could all use in our own work even after the workshop if we enjoyed doing it or if it was effective and correlated with their work.

How I made my own work with the etching tool

1)      I started out by taking my own drawing I made and expanded it in size with a photocopier. I then traced the design on a tracing paper with a pencil. After this I then put the traced drawing of my picture on a a4 sized silver sheet of reflected card.

2)      Now that the silver card has a rough outline of the drawing I used the ‘etching engraving tool’ to scratch away the parts of the outline. If I wanted to take out a whole space of the outline and create a much bigger line instead of a small line I would cut out a rectangular shape and then peel the silver card.

3)      After cutting all of the design out I covered the entire silver card with ink and used a cloth to remove any excess ink that I do not want to be shown on the final outcome. To get into the hard to reach spaces one of the University students recommended that I used a small cotton bud to erase the ink from the silver card.

4)      The penultimate step I used the copper plate press to press the card onto a piece of paper. Using high pressure on the card let all the ink transfer from the silver card to the piece of plain paper.

5)      Finally I peeled the of the paper from the silver card to reveal my final outcome of my etched drawing.

In my opinion this step is extremely useful for some parts of work but I cannot see myself using this for my theme of video games since for my final piece I do not want to use only the colour black.

Below are some pictures of the final outcome.