Living Prints Mezzotint On-line

Designs that vanish

Depending on when you opened this page on the World Wide Web, you may have come in at the beginning, middle or end of the process. You can back-track or take sideways views of the mezzotint and printing process by selecting highlighted key words and images. If you want to start on the first day, select here.

The boredom of roughening the plate is lessened somewhat by the designs that resulted as work progressed. I worked from a black-and-white laser print glued to a copper plate, punching (aka stippling) thousands of tiny pits with an electric engraver in the soft copper. Where the print showed black, I stippled. Where the print was white, I left it smooth. In areas that were in-between (gray), I worked lightly.

The image below was made by putting the partly-roughened plate on a scanner. The white and black areas are the paper that remains to be worked with the engraver. The splotchy effects around the borders are leftovers from the original, discarded design. See the opening page.

• Above: Fragments of the laser print, glued to the copper plate, are left after the electric engraver has gone over the part of the image that are to be black in the finished print. Pieces of white paper remain, too. This image was scanned midway through the complete roughening (rocking, or stippling). The copper sparkles under the scanner's light and creates a sheen of transient colors, making this a unique view of the plate!

• *If you have a method you'd like to share for rocking mezzotint plate, or purchasing pre-rocked plates, please e-mail ritchie@artsport.com

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