051r - - - - - Making counterproofs
Make some soap water & with this, rub & moisten the engraved piece that you want to counterproof from, then lay white paper on it & rub very vigorously across the top with a tooth or the bottom of a glass & you will transfer your stamped piece. It is true that it will be in reverse, but if you oil your paper with spike lavender &or turpentine oil, it will show reverse the right way around on the other side. Then follow these lines with a pinceau or a quill, then heat the paper & the oil will go away & leave your paper white. And if you want this not to be known, if, by chance, you borrowed the piece, moisten the paper and the polishing that the burnisher has made on the back, which shows what has been done, will not be known. The soap water will turn the piece yellow, but well—gummed water, which has the same effect, does not do this. If you want to, for the same effect, make gummed water, then mix some soap in it & do as is said.
Cutters of printing plates
To clean the copper plates, or to have worn ones print better, boil them for four or five good hours in a good lye with lye which is quite spent. Then make your ink with some linseed oil & not with walnut oil & press with the rollers. The copper plates are sooner made than wood blocks, but they are not so appropriate for printing promptly. The wood ones are laborious but also will sooner have printed twenty sheets than the other will have done two. To carve in wood, the secret is firstly to poach, that is to say to lay the counterproof or drawn piece onto the wood block & to make sure that the side with the traced line is stuck to the wood. Once dry, you then gently rub with a moist handkerchief the back of the paper which, by rubbing, will become so delicate that almost only the line will remain, which, next, one follows in cutting the surface. You could do this with historiated glass & coat with noir d’escaille, to then scrape & layer your colors on the uncovered area. To make ink for copper plates
at left bottom margin
These rollers are good for printing promptly with cut cartons different kinds of pastes.
at left bottom margin
One can place the plates among the linens when the lye is quite fine, or also in a pot.
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