Making in progress, my latest etching plate is a sci-fi cityscape, in quotes by others “giving Toronto”, “futuristic”, in my own words,

“there is the landscape similar to that of Tolo Sea and Pak Sin Leng mountain range, which is stunning view from my home back in Hong Kong, plus the iconic Lion Rock in the distance. Also the train is the tube in the future and there is also the tip of the Shard and something resembling St Paul’s. It’s nothing new like the escalator going into the atmosphere like the one in Gundam00 so that people on the planet can rely on an array of solar panels for electricity. What’s more? I also took reference from Ettore Sottsass’s The Planet As Festival project. This is a space colony on a planet, with a moon extremely close to the planet, in a triple-star system, in which two stars are much smaller than the main sun”.

It’s nothing really so original or innovative and quite the opposite. But I have been enjoying this contrast between an old method of printmaking and a futuristic subject matter.

As you can see the print is not even half finished. But I have already used 2 new techniques and altogether 6 to make it to this stage.

Firstly of course the things in the front would require clean and definitive lines from hard-ground etching.

Then, soft-ground etching would be good for the things in distance, which are slightly blurred. I used some of the prints as proofs to plan out how I would like to proceed with the plate. Watercolour, ink, pencil, oil pastel (resistance method) and chalk are helpful so these plans.

To achieve the “rocky” texture in the mountain rage, I broke the tip of a graphite pencil and used it to draw on the tissue paper on top of the soft-ground. The graphite was stronger than I thought that I had to throw the pencil onto the floor to break it. LOL But the result was satisfactory.

Next, with force and lever, I burnished away the unwanted marks left by forgetting to block during the soft-ground etching. And started preparing for the next stage: sugar-lifting, a process I have been longing to try. With new development on the plate, I readjusted the preparatory proof (soft-ground still not there only because I started painting on the city on another proof before doing the soft-ground and I like the tones in this one), and tested out how dark I wanted the sky to be.

Sugar-lifting can create interesting patterns on the plate, which is why I think it will be interesting to use on the mountain range and the moon. I was also suggested to use another technique, spit-bite with sugar-lift, which will mainly be the method to darken the sky.

Sugar-lifting is a positive method, i.e. where you brush is where it gets etched, catching ink on the plate. After finishing with the sugar solution, cover the whole thing gently in stop-out varnish.

Put the plate in a plastic tray and pour boiling water into the tray.

The sugar will dissolve, leaving the metal out in the air (water) and some traces behind. I just reckoned there was too much in the sky so I brushed most of it off, once again going against RDS Tutor Rossen’s advice (it was an untutored session but I was in a course led by him before).

Now with the sky cleared out and the moon roughly mapped, I can try another exciting technique－spit bite! Since the session was untutored, I grabbed this book from the petit library and read through how I was supposed to do it in a modern way.

I asked the tutor on duty, Martin Shortis, who is amazing, for gum arabic to do spit bite but wanting me to learn it properly, of course, he wouldn’t. He grabbed a scrap piece of zinc and wiped a mouthful of saliva with his finger onto the plate! I was like…ok…but obviously that was the traditional way, it’s literally “spit”. Then we tried brushing on ferric acid and observed as the covered area instantly started darkening. Martin revealed that he had never done spit bite before! But we figured it out and following his footsteps, I buried myself in the corner and started spitting when no one’s watching. I found it initially disgusting but soon becoming quite fun to do.

Ferric acid is a strong acid for etching copper plate. On zinc, which is more reactive, even the half diluted solution would etch the plate quickly. But at the same time it was not as controllable as normal acid baths, so there has to be some risk taking in order to get the results I want, especially when I don’t have any spit bite experience. Being unable to tell how much have been etched, I removed the varnish and went for a print.

It was not as dark as I expected and quite unevenly etched. So I had to do it again, letting the acid stay on the plate longer. This time, I got some really dramatic tones. The texture on the moon looks organic and around the edge it seems to have a faded glow.

Now it’s time to tackle the city in the foreground. If you scroll back to the early stages where I was planning the tones, you can see that I still haven’t figured out all of that. Plus it is so complex that the aquatint will have to be in small parts, divide and conquer. Each time I’d do a certain area or a group of buildings, and when I got home I’d have to start planning for the next.

For now I’ve only done the traffic tower, the centre of the city. Next would probably be the tube train, or the bubble building, or the cluster on the right hand side. The one above was printed with roux, a weak ink because I didn’t have enough time to wipe a strong ink that day. When the term resume in two weeks, I’ll print again and soon might also have to tune it down by burnishing or see how it goes.

So how were those inspirations cooked together anyway?

Despite the things I wrote in the beginning and all the big words and fancy ideas like futurism, posthumanism, physics theories that I can put on the table, and write a daunting contemporary art essay, it merely just me as a person, setting out a cliché journey to “find myself”. At one point in life I was completely lost and delirious, turning into a zombie. It changed when something happened while I was doing my MA in Fine Art and I made a huge comeback. But even then I am looking at the missing puzzles, like the stories I wrote, or this drawing below, as if it is parts of me that had wandered off the universe. So it’s metaphorical not only regarding the exploration part but also the fact that if I can no longer envision a future, I’m just becoming hopeless and less creative.

It is not about the skills, nor the subject matter, but the things inside my brain, the ability to present them, and the person I wanted to keep being. In art school they teach you to think big, but nothing is ever too small if it matters to you. I want my art to be the journey that takes me to fixes, closures and growth.