Final Portraits

Alexander Percy
-flame coloured jacket and hair
-polished face
-sanded collar
-Oxidised background

Lady Augusta
-flame coloured feathers and shawl
-oxidised hair and dress
-polished face and neck
-sanded lace on dress
-background coloured with citric acid

Lord Charles Wellesley
-polished hair and jacket
-oxidised collar
-sanded face
-oxidised background, sanded back

Edward Percy
-sanded face and hair
-polished neck tie
-oxidised jacket
-oxidised background, sanded back

Nearly finished...

Some of these have a lot more polishing to do but they are really close to being done.

Backgrounds/Wallpaper

Scanned in some lace for one of the backgrounds and then found the above lace pattern on a website called 'historical graphic lace prints'. I wanted them to look rather flamboyant and heavily patterned- making my portraits look quite lavish. hopefully.

There were bubbles in the photoetching paper (which I had not noticed at the time as I was trying to rush) when I placed it on the copper so as soon as I exposed my drawing onto the plate and then placed it in the sodium carbonate, all the areas where the bubbles had been washed off.

Had to redo the patterns with stop-out varnish which takes a while to dry and is also very hard to get on without blobbing it everywhere...

Final plates- oxidising and cutting out

Setting up my plates for Photo Etching

Full sized plates have their photoetching paper on them and I just touched up the edges with stop-out varnish before I put them in the ferric chloride tank

Lady Augusta- Trials for clothing

I really want parts of Lady Augusta's clothing to be 3D and so today was about experimenting with very very thin strips of copper :)

For the lace on her dress I rolled metal through with some lace but the metal got too thin and started to crack and curve round so it was really difficult to do!

I then just bent it round with my fingers as it was really pliable.

The feather I just cut out with a pair of (now blunt) scissors which has worked really well but the spikes are rather sharp!

Alexander Continued

Used a drill to pierce through parts of one plate and then rolled through a 0.5 piece of copper with some lace to create a patterned background.

I used liver of sulphur to make Alexander's coat black and then I layered up masking tape around the areas where I wanted to take off the black colour and gently sanded it off.