After a chat with Basia Smolnicki at Inverlochy about copper sulphat etching, I googled the topic and found this sentence on nontoxicprint.com:

“The characteristic of aluminum is the crystalline structure within the metal, which is revealed by the copper sulfate’s action. This means there is no need for aquatinting to get solid color or lighter tints of any hue.”

In short: no more messing around with powdered resin or spray colour! I had to try this!

Last week I had all the materials together and started on a test etch. It works! So I went on and etched my first aluminium sheet. Now, I won’t tell you how I did it… seeing that I did everything wrong ^_^; however, it still worked (kind of).

I’ll do it the right way next time and take some pictures of the process ^_^…

Exciting!