To get going you need:

• The image you printed in positive to acetate
• An aquatint screen
• A UV sensitive photopolymer plate
• A UV exposure unit to expose the plate to the acetate positive
• Ink, paper and a printing press

This simple list makes it look relatively straightforward but a lot of complexity (and other bits of kit) is hidden within each step.

Supplies and support forums

Assuming for a second that you’re going to get yourself access to a UV exposure unit and a printing press, the consumables you need to source are acetate sheets for the positive, photopolymer plates, ink and paper, and a myriad of other bits and pieces needed for each step. And as the majority of photopolymer practitioners are in the US (anecdotally at least), most of the recommendations for acetate sheets and so on are not generally available here in the UK. So I started seemingly endless research on available alternatives and suitable suppliers. At this point one would normally turn to ‘the forums’ but for photopolymer printing, there is quite a dearth. There is a Facebook group (Photogravure) that was hard to get into until I somehow proved that I was genuinely interested in the process, and the analogue/alternative process focused Photrio.com (that has actually has very little of any real use).

In the end I relied heavily in a very few articles and posts that as you can imagine, contained much conflicting info.

I came to the conclusion that it is not a very widely used technique and is widely seen as being complex and difficult. The Facebook group only has 700 members, there are only a few suppliers of the consumables, and some of the kit, the aquatint screen being a prime example, are hard to source (and expensive). A lot of the consumables are frequently out of stock at one supplier or other and the fact that there are so few suppliers, leads me to think that it’s not massively popular. But the people doing it are truly evangelical which helps!

Aquatint screen

The mythology around this sylph-like item of polymer photogravure ’hardware’ is phenomenal. And they are very hard to source. Or ones regarded as ‘good’ are hard to source at least. Add to the fact that they used to be produced on commercial presses that are now largely obsolete (along with the human skills needed to operate them) makes the aquatint screen something of a difficult beast to grapple with. I ended up buying three of varying age and provenance from eBay and I’ve yet to work out if they are any good. More on this in the next post.