Sunday, 18 August 2013

Acid Etching … musings and plans – Part 3

Tonight, I got around to having another go at the acid etch of my test piece.

If you recall, the last time I did this, the acid wasn’t bighting very deeply in the metal. The process was OK, but the result was rubbish because the acid wasn’t strong enough.

I went and bought some more peroxide and made the acid a little stronger.

01 - transfer

I used a better quality paper (Kodak premium photographic paper this time) and I added some more peroxide to the acid (the peroxide weakens over time with sunlight).

I gave it a good ironing, but the transfer was still missing some bits … so I did it again.

02 - bathe

Then I bathed the piece in water to get the paper off … resulting in …

03 - transferred

A reasonable transfer. There are still some holes in the transfer, but I’m going to go with this anyway. It has a nice distressed appearance.

Next, instead of wiping the acid onto the piece, I immersed the piece in acid for 30 minutes.

After that, I used some acetone to clean the toner from the surface of the piece and gave it a bit of a light polishing.

04 - ascetone

You can see that the acid has bitten more deeply into the surface this time. The overall appearance is quite good, and I am happy with it.

05 - cleaned

As I said earlier, it looks more distressed, and that is a good thing in this case. Of course, I won’t always be looking for a distressed result, so I need to improve my transfer technique so that it does what I want it to do every time.

I’m not really sure what I am going to do with this piece now that I have made it … maybe just cut it out and mount it in a stand … who knows.

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