Multi-tonal aquatint, and a riddle

 Remember the Aquatint self-portrait? Here I use a similar method to create a multi-tonal zinc plate, with black, white, and three shades of grey. For funsies, I included a riddle to go with the print- see if you can work it out! 

Another fun project, and surprisingly simple. For this, I used built up layers of hard ground, a foul-smelling suspension of resin, as a resist to guide the depth of the nitric acid etching.

The thin black lines were drawn as a base layer. To do this, I painted a thin layer of the hard ground on the blank plate and let it dry. (Turns out, if you put your plate on a hot surface, it dries very quickly! Turns out, inhaling evaporating turpentine is a terrible idea)

As with the Morandi etching, I simply scratched away lines in the hard ground to expose the metal underneath. Once the plate was in the acid bath, it took just a few minutes to eat in the design. I then removed the first hard ground layer, and then protected all the white (relatively speaking) areas with further hard ground or an oil-based permanent marker. After that, I hit the plate with a fine layer of spray paint to create the texturized areas, and it was back in the bath for another 30 seconds. This created my light gray layer. 

In this way, I simply added hard ground to protect the areas I wished to remain light gray, then etched the plate again. One more layer of hard ground protected my medium gray layer, and a last dip in the acid bath produced my final dark gray layer on all areas left exposed. 

Here is the final plate, with its layered etching. 

For those of you who are into puzzles, have fun with this: 

My first and second are painted clear, 

with aqua fortis stained severe

Turn twain tones to anglic ear, 

observe and listen, read and hear

My last and penultimate, 

alluding to pommenant; 

carry these further, 

to the consequent tier.

Go forth! Convert,

covertly interpret 

auric and argent

to base of quartet

who is squared. 

once transformed, 

consider the pairs: 

take my twenty-third, then my fifth, 

my twelfth take twice. 

then my fourth, and my fifteenth, 

my fourteenth and fifth.

Arrange them together, 

with no spaces to tether, 

and append on the end of 

a minuscURL.

Good luck! Travel well! 

The password is: preposterous