Hello,
Thanks for the replies, sorry for the lack of introduction.
I'm a member of Beverley Beekeepers and have 6 colonies in East Yorkshire. I started with the bees after asking my grandad to give me his cottage hive, when he'd got too old to manage it. Soon after, a chap in the village gave me all his hives and then I had five colonies, including the fiercest colony of bees some Beverley Beekeepers had ever encountered. So after being stung all over, and in some rather painful places, I was away. I also studied at the Royal College of Art and produce paintings, drawings and prints inspired by bees and beekeeping.
Mezzotint is a form of engraving produced by covering a sheet of copper in minute pits. The artist scrapes and polishes away at the pits to leave an image. The pits hold ink and when the inked copper plate is put through a printing press, under several tons of pressure, the copper yields the ink (ie. the image) to a piece of paper. It's possible to see the 'plate mark' in the photograph above, where the copper plate has embossed the paper.
Best wishes,
Andrew