This is my first copper plate of Alexander. I printed out my design onto acetate, covered my copper sheet with photosensitive film (which cured over night) and then used the UV light beds in the printing room sto expose my drawing onto the metal. Using a sodium carbonate solution, I carefully washed off the film which was not exposed to the light and then went back to re-expose the plate to harden the film. I used stop-out varnish where the light sensitive film was missing and left this to dry for a few hours.
I then placed the copper plate in the etching tank (containing Ferric Chloride) for 5 hours.
After taking it out of the etching tank I then immersed the plate back into the sodium carbonate to remove all of the blue film. I used white spirit to remove the stop-out varnish and then sanded down the plate, running through all of the grades of sandpaper until it was at the finest grade.
Once this was completed, I polished the plate on the polishing mill and stamped the 1mm text into the surface.
Although I like the idea that the text is so small you can barely read it (just like Branwell's writing) for a gallery this would be inappropriate as no one will be able to get close enough to read it when it is in the cabinet on the wall.
I also disliked how the metal warped when the stamps were hammered into it- I much prefer to photoetch my writing into the metal as this will give cleaner, crisper lines.
After doing the first tester- I then decided to do two more for trail purposes. The one on the right will come out similar to the first one- with the lighter lines being those etched- but I really wanted to see what it would look like if I etched around the lines- which is what the prepared plate on the left will do.
The plate on the left was extremely difficult to produce, even to this stage. The first part of the process is to leave it in a sodium carbonate solution but because the lines are so thin where the drawing is, these lines easily came off in the weak solution. There was a small window between the blue film staying on, and all of the film coming off. This was hugely frustrating as it meant that I had to prepare another copper plate with the light sensitive film and leave to cure overnight.
This was the final finished etched plate- I really love this effect as the lines are so crisp and stand out really well against the rest of the copper.
After looking at it- I really wanted to try out enameling the jacket and Alexander's hair. I had never used this process before and so had to enlist the help of Liz, the metalwork tutor.
She showed me the cupboard full of pots of glass particles which were either O for Opaque or T for Translucent.
I decided to do a 'Dark Stone' jacket and so carefully painted on wall paper paste where i wanted the glass particles to stick. I then loosely sieved the glass colour over the metal- making sure that areas were evenly covered.
I then placed it into the enameling furnace and left it in there for about 4 minutes, checking very regularly.
This bottom picture shows what the plate looked like a few minutes after taking it out of the furnace. The surface of the copper oxidized with the heat and has started flaking off and the brown glass is not evenly applied so I will have to re-do it tomorrow.
