Baldwin the Brave Faux Etching

 For the 2022 Bookplate, I originally thought it would be interesting to do an etching for the artwork. I was a printmaking major in college, and I really credit that process with so much of my mental organizations as I layout and ink a piece of my work. However, I no longer have access to the etching supplies & equipment I'd need to safely do an etching at home––so, I opted to fake it and do a faux etching piece that looked close enough that it would work for the bookplate...which I should also address, I decided in the end that this image you see to the left didn't hold up when reduced to bookplate size. My plan is to offer it as an 8" x 8" print in my online store (mouseguard.bigcartel.com) in April when I do another ONLINECON event on my Twitch channel. 

I started by looking at a few etchings of Albrecht Dürer's, specifically this one of St. George. In fact, I started doing a piece of Baldwin the Brave (from the Mouse Guard short story of the same name) in this same pose (not mounted on horseback) with a goose instead of a dragon, but I didn't like him facing away from the viewer. So I started again.

Etchings are prints where a metal plate (zinc or copper) are coated with an acid resist, that resist is then scratched away wherever the artist wants a line to be, and then place the metal plate in acid for the metal to be eaten away (or etched). When the plate is clean and then coated and wiped with ink, the ink goes into all the crevices where the acid etched a groove into the plate, and the image is printed on semi-damp paper on a press.

For the second attempt, I drew a better hero pose for Baldwin, and used the wolf that appears in the story, tangled in the bell rope, as the drama and background element.

This is all pencil on copy paper (later scanned into photoshop and tinted), and in some places (the wolf and the bell) I overworked this for just being a pencil/layout for the final piece, but I wanted some practice at the types of line marks and density I wanted to go for in the final artwork.

I printed out the above layout to the correct scale, and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 bristol. On a lightpad (I use a Huion A3) I was able to see through the bristol surface so I could use the printout as a guide when doing the final drawing. Unline most of my work where I'd use a pen to ink the linework at this stage, I wanted to get a line quality with a little more subtlety and soft edges. So, I 'inked' this piece with a mechanical pencil. I used a lot of pressure, and didn't try to shade my drawing like a traditional pencil drawing, I wanted dark purposeful marks, but with a touch of softness to help sell the faux etching photoshop trickery a few steps down the line.

The original 'inked' pencils were scanned, and I did a tiny bit of level adjustment to help drop out a few light smudges and the bristol's surface texture. 

I felt this piece still needed some tone--which means introducing faking another etching technique called Aquatint. 

Instead of coating a metal plate with a even & complete coat of an acid resist, with aquatint you dust the plate with a rosin. Those little dots of rosin resist the acid and allow the in-between spots to be etched away in the acid bath, making that part of the plate a bit like different grades of sandpaper. Those little pits hold ink at different densities to create different shades of grey/black when printed. In Photoshop I made a grey texture similar to an aquatint texture to use in my last step.

The final assemblage of parts includes: the pencils + a duplicate of the pencils with a slight blur to soften the edges + 3 different densities of my faux aquatint texture (each masked out in places so it appears only exactly where I want it to) + a paper tone & texture & + a sepia color tint over the whole thing.

This was a fun project, and while it won't work for the bookplate, I do plan to release it as a print in April. And someday, when it's COVID safer & when I have access to a studio with the right equipment, I'll do a real Mouse Guard etching again.