This course will teach you all the basics of hard ground, soft ground, and open-bite etching to enable you to create a wide variety of marks and effects. You will experiment with etching onto copper, zinc and aluminium plates using ferric chloride and copper sulphate solutions, both less-toxic alternatives to traditional nitric acid.

The course is led with a hands-on approach from the start, and there is the opportunity to produce a good number of prints to take away with you. You will also learn about paper, inking and registration techniques. This is a great course for beginners and those who need a refresher, and can act as a lead-in to membership of WYPW so that you can continue to use and develop the techniques you have learnt.

Kate Desforges is a practising artist who specialises in printmaking, and is also technician at WYPW. You can find out more about her here