Something that I’ve done in the past is resurface old/ abandoned etching plates left by past art students, by scraping off the old image. Usually these plates would remain in a drawer in the art room forever, but once resurfaced I can use the plate again to etch my own image onto it. This reflects my passion for recycling, and my pet peeve of things not being utilized to their full potential.
The process of resurfacing a plat involves me using a scrapper, a triangular-prism shaped tool to scrape down the surface of the plate until it’s even with the image that they’ve etched into it. This process is not only time consuming but demands a lot of physical work, bordering on arduous. The result is a free plate that I would had to have paid for otherwise, and the relief of another plate that would have ended up sitting there in that drawer, forever, until it was eventually thrown away.
The most current plate that I’ve taken to the task of resurfacing is already almost completely blank. Two days of scrapping and the image on the plate is almost completely erased. Making prints of the plate lets me know what area of the plate needs to be worked on further.
Even though scraping only take off a small bit off at a time, I can amass quite a sizable amount of shaving after a few hours.
Here is a print at the beginning of the day, and a few hours of scrapping after.
In every consecutive print, the image becomes fainter and fainter, until the image is finally gone, and the plate is blank once more, ready for a new image to be etched into it.
