Printmaking has all of the excitement of gambling without its guilt
and ruin. --Samuel Palmer
\\\Spit Biting\\\
In intaglio printmaking there are a wide variety of techniques for
etching areas of plates in order to produce tones when printed,
including aquatint (using either traditional resin or the more
expedient spraypaint), soft ground, white ground, sugar lift
aquatint, the list goes on. Ruth Leaf's book will give you all
sorts of details on intaglio etching methods including recipes for
grounds and stop-out resist and how to mix up white ground if
you're interested. But by far the most risky and thus the most
interesting is 'spit biting'.
Etching produces areas that will hold ink in a metal plate by
removing (biting) selective areas out of the plate surface with an
acid/water mixture. The depressions thus created then hold ink
while it is wiped away from the areas that are to print white. It
can produce lines or texture depending on the method and how it is
used. You protect the areas you don't want 'bitten' by the acid
with some sort of greasy material, there are a variety of these,
usually referred to as 'grounds' - hard ground, soft ground, white
ground, etc.
In spit biting some sort of resist is applied to the plate first,
usually aquatint resin or the afore-mentioned lazy man's stippled
spraypaint. Spit biting involves the direct application of acid to
the plate, usually in some sort of carrier medium to keep the
strong acid from immediately etching the plate too fast - although
fine control of the etching really isn't the idea with spit biting.
You spit bite a plate to add 'texture' or randomness to the image,
to allow the process or nature or the universe to have some say in
the image rather than controlling everything.
So if you're talking about nitric acid etching of zinc plates (the
most typical intaglio etching combination) the bath for normal
etching would be mixed up as a 10:1 or more water:acid ratio - 10%
or less acid. This keeps things slow and controllable. You put your
plate into the bath and you gently remove the effervescent bubbles
with a feather as they show up. In spit biting the ratio
is obviously not usually as controlled and usually 'hotter'
concentrations of acid are used, up to and including full strength
acid. If you do this and f*ck up your image, don't go crying to
your instructor - that's a 'laugh with you or at you' situation,
you did it to yourself bub.
Beyond the randomness of spit biting you can also 'open bite' a
plate after lines or texture have been produced on it, allowing the
acid to randomly reduce or remove some of the image or texture you
have already produced with no stop-out or ground to protect it.
Burn, baby, burn. This can have very good or very bad results,
depending on how much you love chaos.
So the name of spit biting comes from, you probably guessed it,
using saliva to dilute the acid applied and make it a bit more
viscous so it will stay where you want it. Gross, right? Ah, the
old days, they worked with what they had at hand.
Our instructor relayed from her student days of that printmakers
would pass a jar around the studio for everyone to spit a bit into
it to provide someone enough saliva to make up a spit bite for
etching a plate rather than using the plain old gum arabic. While
things like that may seem disgusting to some, the creation of art
involves doing things and dealing with things that regular folks
shy away from. Etching involves acids, oily grounds, solvents, and
other smelly and potentially toxic substances. It also conjures up
images of witches gathering strange substances for the brewing
of potions I suppose, or mad scientists locked away in dark
laboratories.
Thus if you ever want to try out spit biting an intaglio plate, my
most important piece of advice is: don't anger the Printmaking
Gods, whatever you do.
Some other time I will have to share the tale of cookies as the
solution to your lithography stone troubles.
NO CARRIER
