PRINTMAKING TECHNIQUES
Intaglio Printing
Intaglio comes from the Italian word intagliare, meaning
"to incise." In intaglio printing, an image is incised with
a pointed tool or "bitten" with acid into a metal plate,
usually copper or zinc. The plate is covered with ink, and then wiped
so that only the incised grooves contain ink. The plate and a dampened
sheet of paper are then run through a press together to create the
print. Usually the paper sheet is larger than the plate so that the
physical impress of the plate edges, or the platemark, shows on the
paper. The ink on the print tends to be slightly raised above the
surface of the paper.
The intaglio family of printmaking techniques includes engraving,
drypoint, mezzotint, etching, aquatint, and spitbite
aquatint.
Engraving
is a process in which a plate is marked or incised with a tool called
a burin. A burin works on a copper plate like a plow on a field. As it
is moved across the plate, copper shavings, called burr, are forced to
either side of the lines being created and these are usually cleaned
from the plate before inking. An engraved line may be deep or fine,
has a sharp and clean appearance and tapers to an end. The process is
slow and painstaking and generally produces formal-looking results.
Drypoint prints are created by scratching a drawing into a metal
plate with a needle or other sharp tool. The technique allows the
greatest freedom of line, from the most delicate hairline to the
heaviest gash. In drypoint the burr is not scraped away before
printing but stays on the surface of the plate to print a velvety
cloud of ink until it is worn away by repeated printings. Drypoint
plates (particularly the burr on them) wear more quickly than etched
or engraved plates and therefore allow for fewer satisfactory
impressions and show far greater differences from first impression to
last.
Mezzotint
is a technique of engraving areas of tone rather than lines. In this
method, the entire surface of the plate is roughened by a spiked tool
called a rocker so that, if inked at that point, the entire plate
would print in solid black. The artist then works "from black to
white" by scraping or burnishing areas so that they will hold
less or no ink, yielding modulated tones. Because of its capabilities
for producing almost infinite gradations of tone and tonal areas,
mezzotint has been the most successful technique for the
black-and-white adaptation of oil-painted images to the print medium.
Etching has been a favored technique for artists for centuries,
largely because the method of inscribing the image is so similar to
drawing with a pencil or pen. An etching begins with a metal plate
(originally iron but now usually copper) that has been coated with a
waxy substance called a "ground." The artist creates the
composition by drawing through the ground with a stylus to expose the
metal. The plate is then immersed in an acid bath, which
"bites" or chemically dissolves the metal in the exposed
lines. For printing, the ground is removed, the plate is inked and
then wiped clean. It is then covered with a sheet of dampened paper
and run through a press, which not only transfers the ink but forces
the paper into the lines, resulting in the raised character of the
lines on the impression. Etched lines usually have blunt rather than
tapering ends.
Aquatint
is an etching process concerned with areas of tone rather than line.
For this technique, the plate is covered with a ground or resin that
is granular rather than solid (as in etching) and bitten, like
etching, with acid. The acid bites between the granules. The design,
wholly in tonal areas not line, is produced by protecting certain
areas of the plate from the acid with an impervious varnish, by
multiple bitings to produce different degrees of darkness, and by the
use of several different resins with different grains.
Spitbite
Aquatint
involves painting strong acid directly onto the aquatint ground of a
prepared plate. Depending upon the time the acid is left on the plate,
light to dark tones can be achieved. To control the acid application,
saliva, ethylene glycol or Kodak Photoflo solution can be used.
Traditionally, a clean brush was coated with saliva, dipped into
nitric acid and brushed onto the ground, hence the term "spitbite."
An earlier but related technique, usually called lavis,
involved painting the plate directly with acid, essentially drawing
with acid rather than ink, and then washing it off when the desired
effect had been achieved. Used usually -- and only by certain artists
-- in conjunction with etching, there are few known prints of pure
lavis work.
OTHER
TECHNIQUES
Collagraph
takes its name from the French colle, meaning glue, and the Greek
graphos, meaning drawing. An image is composed from a variety of
textured materials glued onto a solid base such as cardboard or wood.
This is the matrix. The plate may be printed as a relief by rolling
ink onto the surface or, alternatively, it may be printed as an
intaglio by spreading the ink over the entire matrix and then wiping
it off the raised surface. Paper is placed over the inked plate and it
is run through a press or printed with hand pressure to transfer the
ink. Essentially, it is a print from a collage.
Monotype/Monoprint As their names imply, monotypes and monoprints
(the words are often used interchangeably but shouldn't be) are prints
that have an edition of one, though sometimes a second, weaker
impression can be taken from the matrix. A monotype is
made by drawing a design in printing ink on any smooth surface, then
covering that matrix with a sheet of paper and passing it through a
press. The resulting image will be an exact reverse of the original
drawing, but relatively flatter because of the pressure of the press.
A monoprint is made by taking an already etched and
inked plate and adding to the composition by manipulating additional
ink on the surface of the plate. This produces an impression different
in appearance from a conventionally printed impression from the same
plate. Since it is virtually impossible to manipulate the additional
ink twice the same way, every monoprint impression will be different
from every other one. Degas made monotypes; Whistler made monoprints.
