Safer Silver Etching

I have been desperate to try out silver etching for a long time. I love working with etched copper and wanted to create the same effects on sterling. The only problem was the chemicals involved in the process. Usually silver is etched using Nitric acid, a highly toxic and corrosive liquid which emits harmful gases while eating away at the metal. As much as I love undertaking dangerous activities, the thoughts of messing around with strong acid worry me. So I’ve been looking for a safer alternative. 

My research started off looking in to different solutions for stripping the silver, I found ferric nitrate and silver nitrate. I have silver nitrate in my ever growing collection of raw materials for glaze mixing so I decided to go with that. Silver Nitrate is still a hazardous substance and should be treated with care. I wear a mask when mixing it and rubber gloves. Silver Nitrate won’t do any harm if it touches your skin as a diluted solution, it’s actually used for certain skin treatments, but it will stain your hands a lovely shade of brown, it won’t be apparent at first, but it’s light sensitive so the minute you go out in the sun, they will change colour… ask me how I know! It is also dangerous if you get it in your eyes. Always take proper safety precautions and use common sense!

To etch with silver nitrate you also need a power source and a few other bits and bobs which I will tell you about as we go along. The power source listed was a bench supply, I have one of those, but I wanted to try and see if the process worked the same as salt water etching, so I'm going battery powered!

So to start, I cut as close to a circle of silver as I could, and also cut a dreamcatcher design in vinyl to use as a resist. You can use all sorts of things to mask with, pnp paper, stop out fluid, and ironed on toner. But I haven’t had chance to test how they work yet, so I went with what I know! 

Here’s the silver ready to go with the areas I don’t want to be etched masked out. I also masked the back of the disc.

The silver piece needs to be suspended in the silver nitrate solution, so for this I used Aluminium wire wrapped around the edge so it was touching the silver and taped it on from the back.

The other supplies needed are a steel bowl, (I used a small water bowl from the pet shop) a D size battery and holder with terminals (not sure of the proper name for that!), a couple of crocodile clips attached to the positive and negative of the holder with copper wire, and a bamboo skewer.

100ml of water was put in to the bowl and I added 1 gram of silver nitrate. Always add dry ingredients to wet to save splashes! Stir with an old spoon until the crystals have dissolved, and the mix is ready to go. 

The bamboo skewer is placed across the bowl and the aluminium wire bent around it to suspend the silver so that it’s fully submerged, but not touching the metal of the bowl. 

The negative wire from the battery is clamped on to the metal bowl, and the positive is connected to the aluminium wire to complete the circuit. Once both crocodile clips are attached to the battery, the etching process will start. It’s not as fast a process as if you were using nitric acid. I left the silver in for about an hour to get a shallow etch, it could have probably done with twice that! 

If the etch is working you will see a grey fur appearing on the wire and the silver. You can see here how dirty the solution gets as it etches. To reuse it, you need to strain all the bits out and pour it into a bottle for storage. (I swapped the wire over before this picture for copper, as I wasn’t sure if it was working. I didn’t realise that the aluminium wire was coated, so after sanding it off, I switched back and it worked fine!)

I’ve been looking around for information to dispose of the solution and bits safely. When you’re finished with it, the solution can be neutralised using table salt. The advice given is to add salt until no more white precipitate is produced and then hand it over to your local hazardous waste disposal facility, the same as you would with ferric chloride used for copper. It has also been suggested that as it is silver, photography shops can help you get rid of it safely, as they send in their spent chemicals to companies that recover the silver.

So after the hour, I couldn’t wait any longer and took out the silver piece. 

This is how it looked when I first took it out. After a scrub with a scourer, I treated it with liver of sulphur to bring out the texture and sanded back lightly to reveal the pattern.

This attempt wasn’t deep enough to polish, when I tried it lifted all the patina off again, but I quite like it as a matt textured piece!

I can’t wait to try this out again and experiment, I can now do all the things I’ve tried in copper, but in Sterling silver!

Caroline

http://www.blueberribeads.co.uk 

The Good, The Bad and the Downright Odd...

Well my new studio has been up and running for about six weeks now and it's finally beginning to feel like a real creative space...yep, despite having all that storage space - it's a mess! I am trying to be good though and tidy up a bit more but it's such a luxury to have so much space to work in that I can't help flexing my creative muscles and spreading out all over the place.

 Aside from the space, the biggest joy is that the studio has a dedicated water supply (rather than the bathroom I was using and wrecking before) which means that I can now get down to some of the things that were just impractical before.

Back in October of last year I went on an etching course and last week I finally got my kit set up and spent many hours playing to my hearts content. The picture above is some of my pieces floating in their etch bath attached to pieces of packing foam - one of the tips picked up on the course and a great idea as the floats double up as handles too.

I decided the best way to get my hand back in was to just go over what I'd learnt in October and I started off with one of the easiest resists - craft outline stickers...

These are cheap and so simple to use and they produced really strong well defined edges. These were etched for just 45 minutes although I didn't stick the top one on its float properly and it fell off, but even so it produced a pretty good etch sitting on the bottom of the bath.

The only  down side to these is that there is a limited subject matter available - for me anyway but this is not really a problem when you have a die cutting machine just waiting to be put to work making your own vinyl stickers...next on the list and another post I'm sure.

After that I moved onto PNP (Press and Peel) photo transfer paper as my resist. With this you photocopy your designs onto the blue paper or film and then press it on to your metal using an iron.

 

There is a bit more guess work with this in getting the timing and heat right and making sure you don't get lint or bubbles between the two. If you can get that right though you can also get some really good clean etches...

Original French Art Deco design

One of the things I like about PNP is that you can etch very intricate and pictorial designs and I've been collecting images for this ever since the course and couldn't wait to use them but, this is where I learnt some new lessons. While I was merrily photocopying my images it completely escaped me that when they were transferred from the PNP they would be reversed and that when the copper was etched  would be negatives of the original image - doh!

That's not necessarily a disaster though as with this piece for example... although the original black and white image is very strong I still like the way it has come out in reverse and for a jewellery piece I think it works well - I love the fine detailing.

Original French Art Deco design

I've also used alcohol ink in my work for the first time on these pieces. I wanted there to be a differentiation between this and my bronze clay work and I like the subtlety of the finish the inks give.

On this next piece - an illustration by Aubrey Beardsley (not the Lone Ranger...) the negative image had a more, shall we say interesting effect...

 It's rather odd and this 'oddness' has been exacerbated by the fact that I decided to go for broke and see what it looked liked domed. The reflection in the photograph has given is a three dimensional effect and while it's rather strange there is something about it that draws me to it and who knows...it may well generate ideas of it's own in the future.

And then of course there are some images that just don't work like this lovely image of a group of mermaids (apologies for poor quality) which is just too detailed to see clearly in the negative.

However, even this has a silver lining and since the etch is clean and deep I am hoping that I can use it as a texture plate with metal clay - much as old illustrations were made from etched plates.

Fortunately for me photo editing software allows me to flip images and invert them to negatives before I transfer them so in future, I can choose how I want them to be - note to self to do just that!

So all in all I had great fun with this, learnt a few lessons and continue to broaden my knowledge and skills base. There may even been a little collaboration between myself and another AJE colleague coming out of this but you'll just have to wait and see what that is.

I hope you found this interesting and if anyone has any etching tips they'd like to share, as always they will be gratefully accepted.

Lesley
The Gossiping Goddess