Always willing to try some new approaches Jane at Inkspot suggested trying out lino etching. It gives some great textures and tones that you wouldn’t normally associate with a traditional lino cut.
I followed the recipe for the caustic soda mix from this great post by the brilliant The Curious Printmaker.
200 ml water, 3 tbsp caustic soda, 2.5 tbsp wallpaper paste, mixed in a glass jar.
Caustic soda eats away at organic material, so this process works only with natural hessian backed lino and the solution wouldn’t eat away at the plastic blocks many use. By using vinyl as a mask, only the areas left exposed are eaten away.
The slideshow above shows the stages of applying a vinyl mask (brown tape also works great), cutting and removing the areas to be etched. Then you see the painting of the solution and the discolouring of the etched areas. It’s important to use a synthetic brush as natural fibres will disintegrate.
I experimented on various blocks with different timings prior to this example. I found an hour gave a decent etch, but also as it was cold in the studio working in February, I think less time in warmer days would work well.
You can also see me neutralise the caustic with vinegar and the scrubbing process to remove the etched area.
Because etching lino doesn’t create deep cuts in the same way a traditionally cut block does, you have a lower surface with textures and inking the lino in intaglio as well as relief gives you more interesting results than just relief.
Above are some of the earlier tests with smaller blocks. Using a scalpel to cut through the tape to create a mask, you can see how the fine lines are etched and show when printed in intaglio, but this too shallow a bite doesn’t allow for a decent impression when inked in relief.
For the areas drawn in green on the blocks I used vaseline as a resist against the caustic to create different marks.
As the relief wasn’t enough I remasked the image and re applied the caustic for another hour. Below you can see a much clearer impression from the added depth.
In conversation with Jane, she spoke about the practice of lightly sanding a block to help give it a fine tooth for ink adhesion. When trying this on a ink stained block I loved the pattern and almost stone or ceramic glazed look it created, so I decided to do a final etch. I used acrylic paint as a block out and then sanded with a course sand paper. I would advise using something like brush on tip-ex or nail varnish as a more effective stop out, but it did work.
The outcomes vary quite drastically, depending on how you ink the blocks. To create a consistent edition it would be important to clean off the block each time, to apply the etching ink, then relief ink, making it quite time intensive and maybe impractical. A solution would be to use a method of inking called viscosity printing with varying hardnesses of rollers and oil content of inks, which I investigated later on.