One of the beautiful things about etching a plate is the surprise you get when printing a proof.  You spend so much time working up the image but until you actually see the printed result, you don’t know for sure what you have.  So I always like to print in stages to see the evolution or devolution of the etching as it goes.  Here’s the step by step of Spirit Voyager; a plate I worked on this summer at Fleischer Art Memorial.

The first stage was getting the line drawing outlined with some aquatint additions.

The second stage there is some more aquatint; starting to develop tones, and the lines are etched deeper allowing for more ink to be held in the etch, producing darker lines.  In the proof I came over part of the head with some white chalk to maybe burnish back some of the built up darker areas there, but as you’ll see that’s not what I ended up doing.

The horizontal lines I had developed behind the figure to suggest a shallow background, I separated a little more with the addition of a aquatint gradation.  I think this adds a nice bar of focus concentrated around the middle of the face and makes for a more finished design.

I was very happy with the result of this image, especially being that it was the first etching I had worked on in several years.  Unfortunately due to time constraints, I was only able to print this one artists proof, so hopefully in the near future I will be able to produce a larger run of this plate for sale.

More on that later.