Scratch ‘n’ print
Wednesday night was a lively one – with non-stop scratching, inking, scraping and printing.
Angus demonstrated his simple etching lesson, where we used metal nails to scratch lines into plastic. The process created trenches on the surface of the plate that caught the ink. And as a bonus, we could effectively trace the flower pictures through the plastic.
He was the messy one and inked up and cleaned off the plates before we got to put them through the roller. The bonus was using the school’s large new printing press, funded by Berry Burn Windfarm’s Community Benefit Fund.
Angus also showed us how to add a bit of colour to the paper before printing. We splashed watercolour, dabbed bleeding tissue paper and smudged acrylic paint onto the damp paper, creating some lovely effects to accompany our flowery outlines.
Spey Art Group 