IN all the various methods of making illustrations to which I have so far called your attention, it was necessary that some part of the work should be done by a specially trained craftsman, at least if any practical and commercial result was desired.

Now in etching, the more you yourselves do and the less any one else does, the better should be the result.

An etching is, in its narrowest sense, a print from a metal plate into which a design has been bitten or eaten by acid; again, in most of the other methods, the printing was from relief blocks like type, and therefore those illustrations could be printed with type. Now we have to consider another sort of work, namely, intaglio, or incised, or sunken work not printed from the surface, but from lines cut below it, and therefore unavailable for letterpress printing. Of course it would be easy to make a relief block in metal, or an incised block of wood, to reverse the treatment in printing, but it would not be natural or right.

The whole difference is this: if a wood block has a line cut in the surface and the whole face is inked with a roller, the line will print white and the rest of the block black. If the etching plate is inked and cleaned off, as is always done, it will print white; if a line is cut in it, the ink will remain in that and produce a black line. Of course they must be printed in appropriate presses.

In its broadest sense an etching may be produced in any one of a number of ways, by the artist, on a metal plate which may be printed from.

It is never a process or mechanical engraving, and never was and never will be, and the attempt to palm off mechanical blocks or plates is a swindle and a humbug.

Etchings are produced in the following manner; at least this is the best and simplest method.

A plate of highly polished copper, zinc, or even steel, iron, or aluminium is obtained from the makers, William Longman, of Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street, or from Messrs. Hughes & Kimber, West Harding Street, Fetter Lane, or Messrs. Roberson, 99, Long Acre. Copper, however, is the best and almost universally used. This should be carefully cleaned with a soft rag and whiting; then it should be gripped by a vice with a wooden handle, in one corner, care being taken to put a piece of soft paper between the vice and the plate to keep the teeth of the former from scratching it; heated, either upon an iron frame with a spirit or Bunsen lamp under it, or over the gas, until, if you take a ball of etching ground and touch the plate with it, the ground melts. This ground is made of resin, wax, and gum; the best is made by Sellers in England and Cadart in France. All these materials can be bought of Roberson or Hughes & Kimber. Touch the hot plate in several places with the ground. It should melt at once; then take an American etching roller (which I think you can only obtain at Roberson’s) and go over the plate rapidly with it in every direction, until the little masses of melted ground have been spread evenly and thinly in a film all over it. With a little practice you should be able to do this in a couple of minutes, and you can lay in this way (which is unknown virtually in England) a thinner, harder, more even and very much better ground, with less trouble, than in any other. Heat the plate again a little more, and take a bundle of wax tapers twisted together by heating them, light them and pass them under the face of the plate held, varnished side downwards, by the vice; do not touch the plate with the taper, or the varnish, being still melted, will come off, but go rapidly back and forward, allowing the flame only to touch the surface. In a few minutes the varnish will have been completely blackened by the smoke. Next, take a bottle of stopping-out varnish (which you may as well buy; don’t bother to make it) and cover the back and edges of the plate. If this is done while the plate is hot, it dries very fast, and as soon as the plate is cool it is ready to work on.

This is the first stage. The waxy ground is put on to protect the plate from the acid with which it is to be bitten, and it must be so well made and well put on, that one can draw through it, without tearing it up and without any resistance; also it must adhere firmly to the plate, where it is not drawn through, and must resist the acid perfectly in the untouched parts. The smoking is done to enable you to see your lines in the copper, light on dark; this is rather curious at first, but you will get used to it. The stopping-out varnish is also to protect the plate, and is only a cheaper sort of ground dissolved in oil of lavender or ether. When the plate is cool, it should be of a brilliant uniform black, and if there are any dull, smoky-looking places on it, the ground is burnt. Here the ground may be rubbed off, or will show cracks, if you touch it, in these places, and the varnish should be cleaned off the face with turpentine, the plate carefully dried and regrounded. Otherwise the varnish will either crack while you are drawing on it, or come off in the bath of acid, and your work will be spoiled.

You draw upon the varnished plate with needles or points; any steel points will do, from a knitting-needle to the best big point you can get. The small needles invented by Mr. Whistler I find the best; but this is a personal liking. They are of all shapes and sizes. You may commence and draw in your entire subject, only remembering that you must leave your foreground lines further apart than those in the distance.

You may make your drawing either with the same needle, all over, or with needles of different sizes; for though one half of the art is in the drawing, the other half, and the really characteristic half, is in the biting. There is very little to be said about the drawing, save that you must draw just as well as ever you can; you will find out almost immediately that you have the most responsive tool in your fingers, and that you can work with it in any direction. Do not bother, if you use the same needle, because the drawing looks flat, and the lines are of the same width; the biting will fix all that. Draw away; if you are afraid to tackle the copper straight away with a point, paint your design on it, with a little Chinese white, or, if you have a pencil drawing of the subject, you may make a tracing from it, and go over that, transferring it to the plate; or you may turn the drawing face down and run it through a copper plate press; the drawing will come off on the varnished surface in reverse, and if you are doing a portrait of a place you must otherwise reverse it yourself. If you wish to sketch from nature in reverse, put up a mirror on an easel, and turn your back to the subject, drawing from the picture in the mirror, for, you must remember, that any subject drawn, as you see it, on a copper plate, or even a wood-block, prints in reverse.

Next, to bite or etch the drawing into the copper plate, take equal parts of nitric acid and water and mix them in a glass-stoppered bottle, some hours before you wish to use the mixture, for there is enough heat produced by the chemical action to melt the ground if it is used at once.

Or have a quantity of what is known as Dutch mordant made; this is composed of—

Two parts Chlorate of Potash,
Ten parts Hydrochloric Acid,
Eighty-eight parts water.

Next, get an ordinary photographer’s porcelain or rubber bath or tray; lay the plate in it, pour the acid over it; in a few seconds bubbles will arise, in all the lines; brush them away with a feather; leave the plate, if there is any fine work on it, in the bath for only two or three minutes, say for a light sky; take it out with rubber finger-tips or a stick, for the acid will burn your fingers and a drop will rot your clothes, staining them light yellow; wash the plate thoroughly in clean water, dry it carefully with blotting-paper. Take some of your stopping-out varnish, thin it with a little (a very little) turpentine, paint over the very lightest parts of the drawing with a camel’s-hair brush dipped in the diluted varnish, and thus stop them out—that is, stop them from biting any more by painting them with the varnish. Wait till the places where you have painted the varnish are thoroughly dry; then put the plate in the bath again and bite the next stronger, nearer set of lines; of course, save where the lines are covered by the stopping-out varnish, they will keep on biting. Continue biting and stopping out till you get to the foreground, where the lines should now be quite broad and deep; take off the ground front and back by washing it with a rag dipped in turpentine, dry it, and the plate is ready to print from.

Another method is to commence by drawing in the darks, biting them, then drawing in the middle distance, the darks going on biting all the while, and finally the extreme distance, when the whole plate will be biting together; by this method no stopping out is necessary, but in working out of doors it is awkward to carry baths and acid around with one, otherwise one must run back to the studio, to bite between each stage. But these two methods can be mixed up, and frequently are, and you may also work in the bath, drawing lines through or over others, thus getting richness while the biting is going on. The bad fumes which are given off during the biting are not dangerous. In working with the Dutch mordant, which bites slower than nitric acid and makes no bubbles, but bites straight down, while nitric acid enlarges the lines laterally, you will inhale much of the fumes, but they won’t hurt you. Although you do not see any action with the Dutch mordant, brush the lines with a feather, else a deposit is formed and they will bite unevenly.

It is very difficult to tell when a plate is well bitten, the biting is very difficult, but on taking it out of the bath and holding it on a level with your eye, you can see the bitten lines; you can also feel the biting with a needle, and you may take off a bit of the varnish with your thumb-nail or turpentine and look at the lines, re-covering them again with the stopping-out varnish; but after this, of course, they will not bite in that place.

Again, the lines do not bite evenly; where they are close together they bite faster, and, after the plate has been in the acid some time, it may change its speed of biting; differences of atmosphere and temperature affect it even with the same acid on the same day; if the nitric acid is too weak add more acid; if too strong pour in water, and quick, else the ground will come off: it is too strong when it boils and bubbles all over; it is too weak when there are no bubbles. Dutch mordant eats always slowly, and never, so far as I know, destroys the ground. At the last, for very strong darks, you may sometimes use a little pure nitric acid, but it will most likely tear up the ground, and if you leave it long enough will spoil all your lines, giving you only a great black hole. These are the systems employed by all etchers; the lengthy dissertations about white ground, silver ground, positive and negative processes, need not concern you, they are never practised, and mostly unknown to the best men. These simple directions should enable you to produce artistic plates, if you have the necessary ability. Still, when you have had a proof of your plate pulled—I will talk of printing in the next lecture—you will find that there are all sorts of imperfections in it, possibly holes, places where it is not bitten enough or too much bitten, or that it is too dark or too light all over; it is but seldom that a plate is right when the first proof is pulled. If you find a hole bitten in it, take a burnishing tool, flatten the hole down as much as possible, find the place on the back with a pair of calipers, hammer it up from the back, placing it on an anvil, burnish it again and polish the surface with charcoal, oil, and rags; revarnish the place, redraw, and rebite it. If it is only a small place you may take up some nitric acid on a feather, and paint the little spot to be rebitten with that. A few drops of the acid have nearly as much power as a great deal. In fact you may paint the face of your plate with acid and do your biting in that way, without ever immersing it in the bath at all. If it is too much bitten it must be rubbed down with charcoal and oil, a tedious process. If it is too light it must be rebitten all over; then take a rebiting roller, putting some liquid etching ground on a separate plate, take the ground up on the roller and roll the face of the plate very carefully; the ground should cover the face without going into any of the lines; heat it very slightly to dry the ground, leave it for a day or so and then bite as before. If there are places where lines want joining or little touches of dark would be effective, put them in with a graver or a point.

You may use a graver altogether, and produce a line engraving; or a point, either steel or diamond, and make what is known as a dry-point etching, that is, merely a scratched drawing on the copper; the point throws up, as you draw with it, a furrow, which is greater or less as you incline the point, and this holds the ink, and is called burr, and gives for a few proofs great richness; a steel face can, however, be put on the copper plate, and any number of pulls may be taken. The difference between the cutting of lines with a graver and the drawing of them with a point is this: the graver, both in metal and wood, is pushed from one; the point in etching, and even the knives in wood cutting, are drawn toward one.

Messrs. Roberson have invented a plate of celluloid which, for dry point work, seems to be fairly good, and as this plate is white or cream-coloured, as one draws on it the lines may be filled up with paint, and one may thus see the drawing as one works. Of course, the same thing may be done with dry point on copper. The great advantage of the celluloid is its lightness. It must not, however, be heated in printing, otherwise it will be ruined. Many etchers are now making experiments with aluminium, but no certain results have as yet been obtained.

There are many other forms of engraving included under the title of Etching, although, properly speaking, they have nothing to do with it.

Aquatint: a ground, made by depositing powdered resin in solution with spirits of wine, is poured on the plate, slightly heated, and as it dries the resin adheres to the plate and cracks up irregularly; a drawing may be made on this, and stopped out in the usual way. Or powdered resin may be sprinkled on the plate, heated, when it will adhere, or the plate may be placed in a box containing resin in very fine powder, heated, and the box shaken; the resin will settle on it and produce the ground.

A very similar ground may be made by passing the ordinarily-grounded plate through a copper-plate printing-press, with a piece of sandpaper over it, three or four times, then the design may be painted on it in stopping-out varnish, and at times a very good result may be obtained. Lines may be put in, etched before the ground is laid; but personally I don’t like the lines at all; without them the result is rather like a bitten painting. Silk and canvas can also be placed on the grounded plate, which is then run through the press, to get tints in the ground.

Tints may be obtained after the plate is bitten by painting it with olive oil and sprinkling flowers of sulphur on it, which gives a very charming tint, but it does not last long; I believe that if acid is poured over it, it may last better. Mr. Frank Short says so, but I have never tried the experiment.

Soft ground etchings are made by mixing etching ground and tallow together in equal proportions, covering the plate with this composition by means of the roller: that is, put some of the composition on a clean plate, pass the roller over it till it is covered with the soft ground, and then roll it on to the plate on which you propose to work, smoke it and then stretch a piece of rough-grained or lined drawing paper over the face, as paper is stretched for making water-colours, draw upon this with a lead pencil and then carefully take the paper off; you must not rest on or touch the plate with your fingers; the ground comes away with the paper where the pencil has passed, and the design is seen on the copper, and is then to be bitten in as in ordinary etching.

Mezzotint is also included, for some unknown reason, with etching. The face of the plate is roughened in every direction by going over it with a toothed instrument called a rocker, until it will print perfectly black; the design is then traced on it; the drawing is made by scraping down the lights, and finally by burnishing the whites quite smooth.

Tint effects can also be obtained by a smooth-toothed wheel, the roulette, the same as that used by process engravers; only here it produces blacks, while they use it to get lights.

Monotypes, that is paintings made in colour or black and white on a bare copper plate in the usual way, though they must be handled thinly, may be passed through the press, and they will yield one exquisitely soft and delicate impression. The electrotyping and duplicating of them changes their character and value entirely: it is a ridiculous and inartistic proceeding.

But after going through all this list,—I have barely referred to steel engraving in line, which, as I have said, is only working with an ordinary graver in steel, and is slow and tedious, unsatisfactory drudgery; or to stipple engraving, dotting and biting in dots, instead of lines, as practised by Bartolozzi,—one comes back to the simple method I described at first, the method with some improvements of Rembrandt, the method of Whistler, or in dry point the method of Helleu; and what is good enough for those masters should be good enough for you.