Video: Artist Anna van der Ploeg working on a series of liftground and spitbite aquatint etchings for her during her 2021 residency with David Krut Workshop where she collaborated with printers Roxy Kaczmarek and Sarah Judge.
The David Krut Workshop is the centre of David Krut Project’s artistic collaborations. The workshop has been involved in exciting print collaborations with artists since 2002.
About
The David Krut Workshop (DKW) collaborates with artists to help them create new works, focusing on challenging techniques and aesthetic forms. Located at Arts on Main in Johannesburg’s Maboneng Precinct, DKW was one of the first spaces to join this creative hub in 2010. Originally opened on Jan Smuts Avenue in 2002, David Krut brought in master printers from abroad and imported special materials to advance printmaking in South Africa.
From 2004 to 2020, Master Printer Jillian Ross led the workshop before returning to Canada to open her own studio. Now managed by a team of skilled young printers, DKW is well-equipped with a letterpress, three etching presses, and a steel-facing tank, and it uses top-quality inks and paper. Over the past 20 years, DKW has collaborated with numerous local and international artists, such as William Kentridge, Deborah Bell, Diane Victor, Olivia Botha, Heidi Fourie, Senzo Shabangu, Stephen Hobbs, Maja Maljevic, Pebofatso Mokoena, Helena Uambembe, Anna van der Ploeg, Zhi Zulu and more, solidifying its reputation as a leading printmaking workshop in South Africa.
Thanks to our very talented printmakers, we would not be able to produce so many exciting works. Left to right: Sbongiseni Khulu, Roxy Kaczmarek, Kim-Lee Loggenberg-Tim, Siphiwe Ncube (manager), Jesse Shepstone
Learn about our different print making techniques
Intaglio comes from the Italian word intagliare, meaning, “to incise.” In intaglio printing, an image is incised with a pointed tool or “bitten” with acid into a metal plate, usually copper or zinc. The plate is covered with ink and then wiped so that only the incised grooves contain ink. The plate and a dampened sheet of paper are then run through a press which applies pressure to create the print. Usually the paper sheet is larger than the plate so that the physical impress of the plate edges, or the platemark, shows on the paper. The ink on the print tends to be slightly raised above the surface of the paper.
Drypoint prints are created by scratching an image into a metal plate with a needle or other sharp tool. This technique allows the greatest freedom of line, from the most delicate hairline to the heaviest gash. In drypoint the burr is left on the surface of the plate to print a velvety cloud of ink until it is worn away by repeated printings. Drypoint plates (particularly the burr on them) wear more quickly than etched or engraved plates and therefore allow for fewer satisfactory impressions and show far greater differences from first impression to last. David Krut Workshop have the facilities to steel-face our drypoint plates which electro plates a thin deposit of iron onto the surface of the copper thereby preserving the mark of the drypoint for much longer. View drypoints here.
Engraving is a process in which a plate is marked or incised with a tool called a burin. A burin works on a copper plate like a plough on a field. As it is moved across the plate, copper shavings, called burr, are forced to either side of the lines being created and these are usually cleaned from the plate before inking. An engraved line may be deep or fine, has a sharp and clean appearance and tapers to an end. The process is slow and painstaking and generally produces formal-looking results. Find engravings here.
Etching has been a favorite technique for artists for centuries, largely because the method of inscribing the image is so similar to drawing with a pencil or pen. An etching begins with a metal plate (originally iron but now usually copper) that has been coated with a waxy substance called a “ground.” The artist creates the composition by drawing through the ground with a stylus to expose the metal. The plate is then immersed in an acid bath which “bites” or chemically dissolves the metal in the exposed lines. For printing the ground is removed, the plate is inked and then wiped clean. It is then covered with a sheet of dampened paper and run through a press, which not only transfers the ink but forces the paper into the lines, resulting in the raised character of the lines on the impression. Etched lines usually have blunt rather than tapering ends.
An artist can choose either to work with a hard ground or a soft ground. In hardground etching, the artist draws directly onto a hard, waxy surface that resists the mark-making process, allowing the result to be very much like drawing. In softground etching, the artist draws instead on a piece of paper that covers a soft wax coating on the plate. When the paper is lifted, it removes the wax where the pencil pressed. Lines in a softground etching are often more fuzzy at the edges, like crayon lines. An artist can also use the waxy soft ground to make imprints of other things besides a pencil, like leaves or lace.
Aquatint is an etching technique that creates printed tonal areas. Powdered resin is distributed across a metal plate and adhered through heating. When the plate is submerged in an acid bath, tiny areas unprotected by the resin particles are “eaten away” or “bitten”, creating recesses. The design, wholly in tonal areas not line, is produced by protecting certain areas of the plate from the acid with an impervious varnish, by multiple bitings to produce different degrees of darkness, and by the use of several different resins with different grains. See examples of works with aquatint.
Spitbite aquatint involves painting strong acid directly onto the aquatint ground of a prepared plate. Depending upon the time the acid is left on the plate, light to dark tones can be achieved. To control the acid application, saliva, ethylene glycol or Kodak Photoflo solution can be used. Traditionally, a clean brush was coated with saliva, dipped into nitric acid and brushed onto the ground, hence the term “spitbite.” Spitbiting gives an effect similar to a watercolor wash. See examples of works with spitebite aquatint.
For sugarlift aquatint, a syrupy solution of sugar or condensed milk is painted onto the metal surface prior to it being coated in a liquid etching ground or ‘stop out’ varnish. When later the plate is placed in hot water the sugar dissolves and lifts off leaving the image. Aquatint is then added to the plate before it can then be etched.
Burnishing involves the use of a curved tool to flatten and smooth areas of a copper plate that have already been etched in acid.
In this technique, the artist sketches a composition on a block of material and then cuts away pieces from the surface, leaving a raised area which will receive the ink. A roller is then used to apply ink to this raised surface and the image transferred to paper with a press or by hand burnishing or rubbing. Since the recessed, cut-away areas do not receive ink, they appear white on the printed image. Relief prints are characterized by bold dark-light contrasts and an impress into the paper of the inked lines. The primary relief techniques are woodcut and linocut.
Woodcut is the earliest and most enduring of all print techniques, in which a block of wood is used as the matrix. While woodcuts were first seen in ninth-century China, Western artists have made woodcut prints since the fourteenth century. They were originally conceived as religions icons and sold as souvenirs of a pilgrimage to some holy site. Woodcut soon became a popular medium for the mass distribution of religious and instructive imagery in Europe, not least through books since, with the invention of movable type, the woodblock matrix could be set in the same press with the text and both text and image printed together. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, woodcuts were developed in Japan to an exceptional level of artistic achievement, known as the ukiyo-e period or style. See examples of works with woodcut.
Engraving is a process in which a plate is marked or incised with a tool called a burin. A burin works on a copper plate like a plough on a field. As it is moved across the plate, copper shavings, called burr, are forced to either side of the lines being created and these are usually cleaned from the plate before inking. An engraved line may be deep or fine, has a sharp and clean appearance and tapers to an end. The process is slow and painstaking and generally produces formal-looking results.