aquatint

thumb|upright=1.3|1835 aquatint showing the first production of I puritani. Note range of tones.

Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching that produces areas of tone rather than lines. For this reason it has mostly been used in conjunction with etching, to give both lines and shaded tone. It has also been used historically to print in colour, both by printing with multiple plates in different colours, and by making monochrome prints that were then hand-coloured with watercolour. The term colour etching, frequently used in the art trade, is potentially ambiguous, but most often means one of these two options. thumb|Demonstration sections of printed aquatint, magnified.