Etching is a very difficult Art, but it is exciting. I’ve done etching since 1997. I do etching on copper plate. There’s many techniques I won’t explain, I’ll just show you the result.

The only technique I’ll tell you about is the photo report : to transfer a photo on copper you use the copper plate as a negative. First you need to print the negative on a sheet of plastic transparent paper (rhodoïd) and then you transfer this onto the copper by heating it up and then you put the plastic transparent sheet on the copper with a spatula. This technique is very very hard to handle: the result can be amazing, but very difficult to obtain.

And some of the techniques have strange names such as Mezzotint, soft ground etching, dry point, sugar-lift… Read the legend of the pictures, you’ll find the result of the techniques.

I must tell you about aquatint too. The aquatint is a volatile powder you cook on a plate buy heating it up. When this powder is thin, it gives big black surfaces on the copper plate. When thicker, it gives material with white dots on a black surface. When your copper plate has cooled down, you can work on aquatinte with a varnish and by putting the plate into the acid at different timings, you obtain  light or dark greys.