Printmaking Techniques

Definitions taken from the Grove Dictionary of Art Goldman, Paul. Looking at prints, drawings, and watercolours : a guide to technical terms. London : British Museum Publications ; Malibu, Calif. : J. Paul Getty Museum, c1988.

Woodcut

Woodcut [Fr. gravure en bois, gravure sur bois; Ger. Holzschnitt; It. silografia, xilografia; Sp. grabado en madera, xilografía].

Type of relief print and the process by which it is made. The term woodcut is often used loosely for any printmaking technique that employs a wooden block. Strictly speaking, however, the term applies

only to cuts made on planks of wood.

Left: Durer, The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, woodcut, 1498.

Right: Albrecht Durer, Draftsman Drawing a Portrait, Illustrations to Durer's Work About the Art of Measurement, 1525, (woodcut, 13.1 x 14.9 cm)

Woodcuts

Woodcut block of Indian Mother and Her Babe1976

Woodcut

Wood Engraving

Wood engraving, a technique of engraving in wood that is related to the woodcut, although very distinct in character. Its principal feature is identical, namely that the lines or marks cut away will not

print, the ink adhering only to the raised, uncut parts of the wooden block. However, whereas the woodcut designer works with a broad tool to gouge out large chunks around the lines that are to be

printed, the wood engraver works with a burin and other tools common to engraving, working positively to create delicate white lines. The wood engraver uses a hardwood, generally box, sawn across the grain of the wood and highly polished. It is thus described as ‘end-grain engraving’, as

opposed to the ‘side-grained’work of the woodcut designer. The hardwood enables the engraver to create very fine lines and delicate modelling, generally denied to the woodcut. A prerequisite of the wood engraver is fine, smooth paper, of a kind that became available towards the close of the 18th

century when the history of the medium effectively begins.

Winslow Homer, The Morning Bell, 1873. Wood engraving, 23.3 x 34.4 cm (image); 27.9 x 39.6 cm (sheet). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Wood engraving

Wood Engraving: Inking the block and pulling the final print off the block

Wood engraving

EngravingIntaglio print-making process in which the design is incised with a graver or burin into the metal

printing plate. The lines cut into the surface of the plate receive the ink and are printed on paper.

Bruegel, Allegory of Justice (from The Seven Virtues), c, 1559, (engraving published by Hieronymus Cock, 22.3 x 28.7 cm [8 3/4 x 11 1/4 in]).

Engraving detail

Plate.Generic term for any flat or flattish sheet, slab or lamina of metal or other hard material.

The term applies to the piece of metal employed in printmaking on which an image is incised.

Plate-markThe mark made by the edges of an intaglio plate where it is forced into the paper when

run through the press.

Putting the inked, engraved copper plate through the press

Etching [Fr. eau-forte; It. acquaforte; Ger. Ätzung; Sp. aguafuerte].

Type of intaglio print, the design of which is printed from grooves corroded into a plate by acid; the term is applied also to the process by which the composition is bitten into the printing plate.

Rembrandt, Christ Healing the Sick (The Hundred Guilder Print): detail of Christ, 1649, (etching, 27.8 x 38.9 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Etching detail

Drypoint Type of intaglio print. The process involves scratching lines or tones into the surface of a bare metal

plate with a sharp point or other abrasive tool. It differs from etching in that acid is not used to bite the design into the plate (hence no protective ground is necessary) and from engraving in that the

incising point is not pushed through the surface but rather used as a drawing tool. Drypoint may be used alone or in combination with other intaglio techniques. It may also be employed to retouch or

reinforce designs on etching plates that have been worn out or blurred by use. Its earliest use dates to the 15th century.

Rembrandt made extensive use of drypoint He began adding it to his etchings in the early 1640s. He exploited drypoint burr to produce a soft yet strong effect of depth, often combining etching, engraving and drypoint to achieve a rich tonality of shadows. In more lightly worked etchings he added drypoint accents to establish depth and volume. He often experimented with unusual printing papers to bring

out the softness of the drypoint burr, including warm-toned Japanese papers and vellum.

Drypoint detail, Rembrandt

Aquatint

A variety of etching and essentially a tone process which can be used to imitate the appearance of watercolor washes. The chief element of the process, which was invented in France in the 1760s, is the partial protection of the surface of the plate with a porous ground through which acid can penetrate. The plate is covered with a ground of powdered resin which is attached to the plate by heating. In etching, the acid bites tiny rings around each resin grain, and these hold sufficient ink when printed to give the effect of a wash. The printmaker will “stop out” with a protecting varnish any parts of the ground where he wished to obtain pure white. Gradations of tone can be achieved through careful repetition of the biting and varnishing process.

Detail of an Aquatint

Lithography Lithography, a technique of surface printing from stone or prepared plate. In its simplest form the design is freely drawn with greasy crayon or ink on the smooth surface of a slab

of special limestone, called the lithographic stone. The technique is based on the fundamental antipathy of grease and water. The artist draws directly on the stone which is then prepared by the printer with chemical material that will fix the design to the stone.

Water is applied, and is repelled by the greasy lines, but absorbed by the untouched areas of the stone. A roller is used to apply ink to the surface, which adheres to the drawn

lines, but is repelled by the rest of the damp surface. A sheet of paper is placed on the stone, which is then passed through the lithographic press, thus transferring the design,

in reverse, to the sheet of paper. In principle very large numbers may be printed of similar quality. The technique was invented in 1798 by Aloys Senefelder.

Lithography

SILKSCREEN

Twentieth-century printmaking technique developed from Stencilling. It is commercially known as screen process printing or silkscreen; a group of American artists renamed it serigraphy in 1940 to denote its use for fine art. A gauze textile—originally of organdie or silk, more recently of synthetic fabric or wire—is stretched on a frame. The stencil is made by selectively blocking parts of the mesh. A thick ink is wiped across the mesh with a blade called a squeegee, so that it passes through the unblocked areas on to the surface to be printed.

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962, (silkscreen, each panel 6 ft. 10 in x 4 ft. 9 in.), Tate Gallery, London