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METAL ETCHING

Chemically carve detailed text or line art onto brass or copper. By Tom Jennings

Photography by Tom Jennings

I make forged, obsolete laboratory instruments as art pieces. To render intricate line art and text onto metal panels, I use the same chemical etching process that creates printed circuit boards. The etched areas are only a few thousandths of an inch deep, but they give a clear image that you can fill in with paint or enamel. If you’re building the panels into an object, you should etch them before bending them or drilling any holes. This process only works on flat, solid metal surfaces.

Be warned: This is a highly variable process. I’ve done immaculately perfect panels with smooth 10-micron lines, but most often there are flaws in the materials, rough areas, loss of resolution, or other problems. Cleanliness and care get better results, but the trick is to go with the flow, and work with what you get.

Create the Transparency

You can create your artwork by hand or digitally, but it needs to be rendered as a mirror-image of your final image, in solid black on transparent film. Use black ink only, and print on the coated side, not the shiny side.

Illustrator, the GIMP, Photoshop, and other graphical utilities let you threshold any images into pure black-and-white, to make them suitable for etching. Then use Reverse to produce a printable mirror-image. You want the printed image to read correctly when you’re looking at it with the ink-and-coating side down.

I do my artwork in Adobe Illustrator, and print it on HP transparency film in my Epson 777 inkjet. When my art is ready, I load the transparency film, hit Save, reverse the image, Print, then Undo.

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