The etched piece of lino
and my print
After this I had another attempt at the same image but this time I painted molten wax onto the lino as a resist before painting on the etching paste. I left it for an hour again and this time the resist worked so efficiently that hardly anything etched away! It was a very different effect to the wax crayon resist.
Next I decided that perhaps I should do a time trial on a test strip. I painted my etching mix onto the lino at ten minute intervals over a period of an hour. Not quite as scientific as it sounds: what I discovered was that the thicker the paste, the faster it etched, so 40 minutes actually etched less than 10 minutes...
Time to put some of this into practice again. In my next print, of Venus and the crescent moon, I cut away the moon using lino cutting tools. Then I painted the etching paste onto the shadowed area of the moon and left it for just a short time. This gave it a very lightly textured surface. Rather lighter than I anticipated. When I printed it, it clogged up and hardly showed on the print. So I inked the lino then wiped the textured area with an oily cloth before inking lightly again. The oil seemed to resist the ink a little giving the shadowy effect that I wanted.
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