Copperplate is quite a hard surface in comparison to zinc or aluminium. I haven’t etched on copper for a while. This was an old plate with an aquatint that provided me with a dark area from which I began the composition. The composition is based on an earlier work titled Maria found the “golden spike”, an oil on gessoed paper.
Maria Located the Golden Spike, 2013
The term “golden spike” refers to a part of the early boundary within the Flinders Ranges where 635-542 million year old fossils were found. The significance of the find led the world science community to recognise a new geological period termed the Ediacaran period. The three printed images are firstly with red ink and then I tried a black area on top of the red. In the third image I printed red over dark grey in the background making it a little too dark. I needed to have a lighter grey under the red as a base. I then masked out the areas left as white.
Several attempts at a suitable base layer with trial and error.
More modification with the red layer.
The red could be made lighter by a further lightening of the grey base layer. At this stage I’m half way through the process.
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