Intaglio printmaking is slow and labor-intensive. For The Dunwich Horror Briony will be creating eight plates. Each one begins with a sheet of polished copper, which is covered with a thin film of resist (like wax). She then draws an image on the plate with a needle, scratching through the resist and exposing the metal beneath. Once the image is complete, she puts the plate in a bath of ferric chloride, which results in the exposed lines being “etched,” or deepened; the longer the plate is left in the bath, the deeper (stronger) the lines. This is an etching plate. To produce a print, ink is rubbed by hand into these lines (much more painstaking than inking a form of type), and transferred to a sheet of paper by the tremendous pressure of an etching press.

Aquatint is a more complex etching process used to provide texture, similar to applying a watercolor wash. Briony first etches a plate with lines, and then adds the aquatint. The image at the top of this page shows a print pulled from an etched plate before aquatint (left) and after (right). It involves working and etching a plate repeatedly, until the desired fields of light and dark are achieved. Copies 1 – 20 of The Dunwich Horror will include proofs of the plates after etching but before the addition of aquatint.