Silk Aquatint

I just took a silk aquatint workshop with Kathy Caraccio and it was a great experience. The technique uses only water-based mediums to create the plate and was printed with Faust AquaLine water-soluable inks. It was great fun and a more eco-friendly and inexpensive alternate to traditional aquatint techniques. I should say though, the results of working on this kind of plate differ greatly from the effects you get with traditional aquatints. It will be interesting for me to experiment with this technique and see what I can do with it when I find the time to do so.

The image above is a 15" x 20" plate that I made in the workshop. Kathy says that up to 250 impressions can be made with this type of plate. I plan to experiment with ink colors and transparencies to get the most out of the grey tones from the plate.