Mezzotint

How a mezzotint is made

Nearly all printmaking is additive. You start with a clean plate and put marks into it — bitten with acid, cut with a burin, scratched with a needle — and those marks are what print dark. Mezzotint reverses it. The plate is first roughened all over, until every part of it grips ink and the whole surface prints an unbroken black. Only then does the image begin, and it is made entirely by taking that black away.

The photographs on this page follow one plate through it, from a sheet of polished copper to a print pencilled Square — mezzotint — Maja 2009.

The plate at the end. Every light passage in it was cut, scraped or burnished out of the dark by hand.

1642: Ludwig von Siegen pulls the first mezzotint. The rocker, the scraper and the burnisher have not much changed since.
Dark to light: The ground is laid first and the picture is taken out of it. Etching and engraving work the other way round.
No undo: A burr that has been flattened cannot be raised again. The plate only ever moves in one direction.

The plate

A sheet of copper, rolled flat and polished until it gives back a reflection. Before any work goes into it the surface is cleaned — a paste worked over the whole plate by hand, then rinsed off.

Copper takes a fingerprint. One left here would still be there at the end, sitting in the black as a patch that will not ink properly.

A small square sheet of copper on a pale work surface, polished to a mirror finish. — The plate as it starts: flat, bright, blank. Printed now it would give a sheet of white paper.

Two hands working a white cleaning paste across the copper plate with a folded cloth, a 250 ml beaker standing beside it. — Cleaning. The paste is worked over the surface with a cloth and rinsed away.

A closer view of the same cleaning: the cloth bunched under a thumb, the paste spread in a broad arc across the copper. — Cleaning. The paste is worked over the surface with a cloth and rinsed away.

Rocking the ground

The rocker is a steel blade, curved along its edge and cut into teeth. Held upright and rocked from side to side, it walks forward across the copper, and every pass leaves a line of small pits with a burr of raised metal standing beside each one. Those burrs are what hold ink.

A single pass does almost nothing. The plate is turned and rocked again from a new angle, then turned and rocked again, direction after direction, until the burrs cover it evenly and no bare copper is left anywhere.

This is the longest part of the work and it is the part that never shows. None of it is the picture. It is only the black the picture will be taken out of.

Five mezzotint rockers with turned wooden handles laid in a row below a flat steel file, the toothed blades varying in width. — Rockers, and a file for the plate edges. The blades are cut to different tooth spacings — the finer the teeth, the finer the grain — and the handles are marked so they can be told apart.

A rocker held upright against the copper, its toothed edge biting a band of texture into the plate. — Five frames of one motion. The blade stays upright and rocks; the plate is turned between passes.

The rocker tipped slightly to one side, mid-rock, the textured band widening behind it. — Five frames of one motion. The blade stays upright and rocks; the plate is turned between passes.

The plate after rocking: matte and evenly cross-textured across its whole face, with no reflection left in it. — The ground. Compare it with the plate at the top of this page — same copper. It no longer reflects anything, and inked and printed now it would give a solid black.

III

The drawing comes late

Only now does the picture come into it. The design is worked out on paper first, then laid over the plate and traced through carbon paper — lightly, because the ground is fragile and a heavy hand flattens the burrs that make the black.

What ends up on the copper is not really a drawing. It is a map of where the light is going to be.

A hand drawing a cluster of flowers in pencil on a sheet of white paper.

A sheet of paper lifted at one corner to show the dark carbon paper laid between it and the rocked copper plate beneath.

Taking the light back

From here everything is subtraction. A scraper cuts the tops off the burrs: shorter burrs hold less ink, and less ink prints grey. A burnisher presses what is left flat and polishes the copper smooth again, and smooth copper holds no ink at all — that prints white.

Every tone in the finished print sits somewhere between those two, and the only way to reach one is to remove exactly the right amount. Nothing can be added back. A burr that has been flattened is gone; take a passage too far and it stays too far, or the whole area has to be rocked again from nothing.

Four steel scrapers and burnishers laid side by side, one set in a black handle and three double-ended, each ground to a fine point. — Scrapers and burnishers, ground to different points and edges for different sizes of mark.

A hand drawing a fine pointed tool across the plate, a pale worked patch and a scored diagonal line already showing in the copper. — The light comes out first. The darks are simply the ground, left alone.

The same working seen a little wider, the tool held low in the fist like a pen. — The light comes out first. The darks are simply the ground, left alone.

State by state

Six photographs of the same plate, taken as the work went on: bare copper first, then the ground going down over it, then the image coming back out of the ground.

Unusually for a printing plate, it reads as a positive. The bright, burnished passages are the ones that will print white.

The copper plate bare and still bright, marked only with a few faint scratches. — Bare copper.

The plate duller, its surface crossed by the first passes of the rocker. — Bare copper.

Ink, pressure, paper

The plate is inked all over and then wiped back, so that ink is left only down in the pits and against the burrs. It goes through the press face to face with damp paper, under enough pressure to push the paper into every one of them and lift the ink out.

That same pressure flattens the burrs a little on every pass. A mezzotint plate wears out while it is being printed — which is why the editions are small, and why the earliest impressions are the deepest.

A small black-and-white mezzotint of a cluster of flowers held up in two hands, with wide white margins and a pencil inscription under the image. — The print, inscribed in pencil below the image: Square — mezzotint — Maja 2009.

Maja Ilić in her studio, smiling, holding the finished print beside the roller of an etching press. — Maja Ilić in the studio, with the print and the press.

I try to express my impressions of the world, but leave it to you to discover, in a little bit of colour in the shadow of my black and white mezzotint, your own picture of this world and this life.
Maja Ilić, October 2008