Berry Burn Windfarm

Scratch ‘n’ print

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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.

A man turning a printing press
Having fun with the printing press
pink yellow green paint overlaid with black line print
Etching with colours
close-up shot of scratching into plastic
Scratching into plastic
a black line etching of a flower with pink and yellow blotches
Finished flower
close-up of an etched piece of plastic
A roller going across a plastic plate etched with a flower
Rolling the ink
fingers holding a plastic plate and scraping sepia ink acros
Scraping the ink on an etching
four people concentrating on placing a plate on the printing press
Placing the paper
An etching plate of a flower and its print
The print and the plate
an art class concentrating on their work
Concentrating

 

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