XIV

Scraping

A scraper is a metal tool with three sharp, flat edges that is moved in a glancing, sideways motion to scrape or cut into previously worked areas of the copperplate. Goya used scraping and burnishing in tandem to make compositional changes, to create half-tones and produce highlights in dark tonal passages. In his work Disparate claro (Clear folly) Goya removed flames that emerged from the lower left corner and replaced them with the upended figure of a soldier we see in the NGV impression. (See fig. 37).