Sporting Art

This print is of a Royal Wulff fishing fly just lain out on a pool of water. Which I thought would be an interesting perpective, since most sporting scenes show the fisherman catching the fish. But here it's about the beautiful form of a fly on the water. The Royal Wulff is an aquatint and line etching.

Aquatint is the process of dispersing rosin in the air which covers the etching plate. The plate is then heated, baking on the rosin to a carmelized finish. The plate is then put in an acid bath. The acid eats or bites anywhere the rosin does not cover, the result of this action is the fine mist like apperance on the plate. The varying degrees of tone are created by "stoping out" or using a wax like varish to eliminate the acid from biting a certain area of the plate.

In the end of the Aquatint process, the darker the tone the longer it was in the acid. At this point the etcher is ready to apply the "Hard ground", which will allow the overlay of line work with out harming the work done with the aquatint. The "line work" is scratched into the plate using a steel needle. Again the plate goes back into the acid for a time determined by how dark the etcher wants the line.

Now that the plate is etched the fun begins. The plate is inked up and printed a process that will be repeated until the image satifies the etcher. It took 19 proof states before I was satified with the plate. I then spent 23 hours straight pulling the final 16 proofs for the edition.