Jona8than Green Art and Other Things

Good work there.

I also showed them how to ink and wipe the plate. While there are many ways to do everything in etching of which I made no claims mine were the best, I was adamant about how I value my way when inking and wiping a plate.

Silkscreen is very popular because of the speed of constructing an image and printing. Lithography is relatively quick at printing as well compared to etching. I think that the inking and printing of the plates is what steer some people away from etching due to the time consumed in doing it. [That and the etching chemicals needed for intaglio perhaps...] I'm not an instant gratification dude either, I understand that things take time to be done right. But taking a long time in wiping because it is not done right is what gets me.

It's funny how my opinions coincide with another printer from almost 80 years ago. In the book The Art of Etching by Ernest S. Lumsden is a very complete book on etching and its history, covering many areas. One of those areas is that of inking and printing, and the over elaborate wiping of plates. Rembrandt did one plate of leaving a lot of ink on the plate in place of actually etching the darks in. Whistler than took it to hell, playing with the ink on the plate for different effects and in Lumsden's eye often printing poor or inconsistent images and starting a bad trend.

“Etch for your darks and wipe for your whites” is a saying I remember my etching Prof. Kent Jones saying. Instead of leaving a lot of ink on your plate, etch your darks in the plate and it works out so much better. Especially for getting your whites on the plate. People will spend so much time on their plates, leaving lots of ink to get their darks but then fiddling with q tips in an attempt to get their whites. The ink on the surface keeps getting in the way.

I have seen people spend 30, 45+ minutes on a small plate. I am not trying to knock someone if they're happy doing this. But I have encountered many who complained about the time of wiping or how hard it is. When if they spent the extra time in working on their plate, more crosshatching for the tones or aquatint, burnishing, scraping, etc. They'd spend less time on the wiping.

The first problem is usually putting too much ink on their plates, frosting it if you will and then starting in to wipe. The tarlatan sticks due to all the ink, hard to wipe. So what you do is take a piece of mat card and haula bunch of ink off the surface my running the card across. You need very little ink on the surface. The ink should be in the grooves, you need very little for plate tone.

The thing is I hardly ever use anything more than tarlatan. Very rare will I need to use some scrim/telephone book pages to get to my light areas. Never mind hand wiping, even rarer. Unless it is particularly sensitive work. I work quick, a medium size plate in about 15 minutes. A big pad of tarlatan, quick long and circular strokes across the centre of the plate. At the end lighter pressure, and maybe a little scrim. That's it. On the press bed and print. Quick and consistent.

I think some people would be less frustrated if they did this. People were still fiddling in my class after I explained this to them. Habits can be hard to change and some don't want to rework a plate.

To paraphrase Lumdsen “Great wiping will make a good plate better. But a poor plate will never be better no matter the wiping.”

I am not a professional printer or master printer, though I think I could be one day. I read a lot of books on intaglio and what not. Printed a good few plates as well, not as prolific as I would like but I do O.K. Not even sure why I wrote this other than to get my thoughts down, just to get it out there. Not a instruction but more of a tirade I suppose.