Greetings, and some questions about etching

[SpinyNorman]

Hi everybody.

Just discovered this lovely page, and I fell in love with it instantly.
I am an engineering student from Norway (so sry about the broken english), and im currently interested in making some
etching-art.

Here is my question(s):

Do you have to use a laserprinter for making the picture transfer thingy, and is it important that the
image in use is completly black and white (no greys and such)?

Looking forward for a long and educational quest in the steampunkish ways.

[Doctor When]

Welcome to the board!

The only etching I'm familiar with is copper-clad electronic board etching, and I know better-quality hi-res laser printers can create suitable transparencies for use in this sort of photo-etching method.

However, there are people here with much more knowledge about artistic etching than I...

[alfa1]

Yes, a laser printer is required (as opposed to an inkjet).
The transfer involves a melting of the laser printer toner particles off the paper and onto the brass surface, whereas inkjet printers use, well... ink, which wont melt off the paper and transfer to brass.   

As you've probably read, the type of paper that you use also matters.   My experiments indicate that ordinary paper doesnt work at all (very little toner gets transferred to the brass) but the inkjet photo paper does work.   The length of time you iron it on probably varies according to the brand of paper you use, but I'm using 2 and half minutes for the sheets I have.

I've done one test with a grey scale image, and the results were rather inconsistent.   That is, the blacks and whites turned out as expected, but there wasnt a lot of correlation between the levels of grey and the levels of resulting etch.   I might try again oneday but in the meantime, try it yourself as an experiment.

[SpinyNorman]

Thanks for the tips, I will try to experiment with the greys, but its more logical that it wont work.

I dont have all the equpment ,but il post my results here asap.

ps: I have read up on the material on the steampunk workshop, so I sort of have a clue about what I am supposed to do.

[Prof. George of Chaos]

Looking at older etched images and woodcuts it looks to me that to get greys you have to shade the areas to be grey with more closely or less closely spaced hatching in black to make the illusion. May require a bit of work on the image conversion, if you're working from things intended for electronic printing.

[Duncan Hawthorne]

it's been years, so I am foggy on the details, but I have made transfers using a Xerox copy machine copy and some acetone onto metal plates in a lithography class.  I suppose you could do the same process, theninstead of making a print plate, just use that for your etching template, but ... not sure how well it would work without a press of some sort. 

You may be able to use a large, round, & smooth doorknob or some other implement to rub it on, like a large spoon?  I had kind of forgotten about it until the other day.

check out some of these links.
http://www.deliberate-design.net/xerox_transfer_monoprints_by_barry_peterson.htm

http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/bookarts/1998/02/msg00052.html