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  • A print of something can mean that it's just a file that's been printed out, like a poster in an art shop.

    It can mean it's a silkscreen, which is an image that's been burned into a mesh screen that will allow paint to go through some bits but not others, this is used on fabric and on paper.

    What I do is essentially the same thing that Goya, Rembrandt and Durer did, and that is to work into a metal plate and run it through a massive printing press.

    In the case of the print that I've sold, I've done this by painting with a sugar and indian ink solution onto a zinc plate, then letting that dry.
    Once it's completely dry I varnished it with a thin varnish, then let that dry.
    When the plate is the submerged into water, the sugar treated areas should lift off, leaving you with the image that you want in bare metal and the area that you want to keep white still covered in varnish.
    Then I let the plate dry and spray it with tiny little droplets of a chemical that is designed to resist acid.
    Thid is called aquatinting, and the point of it is to create a surface that will soak up the maximum amount of ink. Think of it like the difference between rubbing oil paint on a smooth surface, then rubbing it off and putting it through a press and then doing the same thing to sandpaper.
    Once the aquatint is on I place my plate in acid. The parts with the varnish should stay white, the parts with the aquatint with print darker the more depth I let the acid eat into it. This is tricky because if I leave it in for too short of a time I get a grey, too long and the surface will break down and become smooth again.
    Once I have the plate perfect, I then rub ink into it, then using differnt kinds of cloth I take most of the ink back out of it, then put it through a massive roller press.

    The process takes a few days, and each print can be very different depending on your wiping techniques. I can do roughly 5 prints of a plate in 4 hours, it normally takes a few days to do a plate.

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