Welcome to The Print Perspective’s resource area with information about how the main printmaking processes (Relief, Intaglio, Screen Printing, and Lithography). 

Each section begins with a history of the process, and at the end is a short video demonstrating how it is done. 

If you’ve never learned anything about printmaking before, we’ve tried to give you all the information you need to become an expert in no time at all.

 

 A History of Woodcut Printing

Relief printing is a very old and simple process.  Similar to making a stamp, a flat surfaced block is carved with a design or image.  The carving block is traditionally wood, but linoleum blocks developed in the 1800’s are also commonly used today.  Any other rigid material can be used for relief, and the processes of wood engraving and woodcut printing are considered to be different methods, but this history will focus on relief printing in terms of woodcut carving and printing, the most common method used throughout time.  Using gouges, chisels, and other carving tools, areas of the wood are removed to create an image in the raised, un-carved areas.  Ink is then applied to the surface using a roller, with the raised surface receiving ink, and the lower, gouged areas remaining blank.  A sheet of paper is then pressed onto the inked block, creating an impression of the image formed by the un-carved areas of the block.

The roots of woodcut prints

The oldest of the printmaking processes, records show that woodcut printing was used by the Egyptians as early as 2000 B.C.E., but because of the perishable nature of these works, they do not exist today.  It was long thought that a version of the Diamond Sutra from China was the oldest relief print in the world, which was dated to about the year 868.  However, a printed copy of the Dharani Sutra from Korea was discovered in 1966, and is thought to predate the Diamond Sutra by more than 100 years, estimated to have been produced between 705 and 751.

It is thought that woodcut printing came to Europe from trade through the Silk Road, as well as the equally important innovation of paper.  European countries had imported paper as early as 950, and in 1276 the first European paper mill was established in Fabriano, Italy.  It became a major center of paper-making on the continent, and continues to produce fine art papers today.

The trade of paper-making had spread to Germany and France by the 15^th Century, which allowed both woodcut and intaglio printmaking processes to flourish in Europe.  Makers of intaglio prints, done on metal plates, were usually goldsmiths and skilled artisans, who were members of upper-class society, whereas woodcut printers were of the more humble carpenter-class, and the audiences for these works corresponded with the class of artists that produced them.

Woodcuts as an early commercial process

Well up into the 15^th Century, woodcut prints were not truly considered art.  Rather, they were viewed as imitations of drawings, and the images tended to use simple black outlines with no tonal values, and any color had to be applied later by hand.  Despite the lack of refinement in the process, woodcut printing was found useful for many commercial purposes in the 14^th and 15^th Centuries.  Monasteries recognized the value of cheaply reproducing images and text on the same page, and often hired woodcut printers to make devotional materials.  On the secular side, one of the most popular and profitable uses of woodcut prints was the production of playing cards.

The adoption of the printing press around the middle of the 15^th Century helped woodcut prints become the main source of book illustrations until the late 16^th Century.  Previous to the adoption of the press, prints had to be made by rubbing the back of the paper when it was placed onto the block, a slower, less consistent method.  One of the finest early examples of a woodcut book illustration is Erhard Reuwich’s work in “Sanctae Peregrinationes”, done in 1486.  The book is about Bernhard von Breydenbach’s visit to the holy land, and Reuwich made the prints from life as he accompanied him, which was an uncommon practice at the time.
 

Woodcut prints become art

Woodcut prints were sometimes used as cheap substitutes for paintings, but the process was not recognized in the art world until Albrecht Durer released the “Large Passion” series of relief prints in 1497, and his “Apocalypse” print series in 1498.  These works used the process in a way never before imagined, and were a milestone in establishing the prints as an artistic medium.  By this time the process had become to the point that woodcut carvers and printers were no longer lower-class citizens, but skilled craftsman in a blossoming trade of the graphic arts.

Woodcut prints in Japan

The one place where woodcut printing developed a strong tradition outside of the European developments is in Japan.  It is thought that the process was first introduced to Japan from China in the 8^th Century, a time when it was used relatively often in many East Asian countries.  Over time the process fell out of favor in most of Asia, but it persisted most in Japan and eventually developed into a unique printmaking tradition by the mid 17^th Century.

Most of the earliest woodcut prints known today are only text.  By the 14^th Century Japanese printers began making pictorial prints.  These images were also made with simple black outlines, but the Japanese style had a much more refined and fluid feel to the line work than the crude, angular images made by their counterparts in Europe.

The influence of this early style can be seen in the ukiyo-e school of art that emerged in the mid 17^th Century during the Edo period.  Roughly translated, ukiyo-e means “pictures of the floating world”.  This name was in reference to the subject matter that the art focused on, which is in reference to images of an illusory or fantasy realm.   During the Edo period, many artists in the capital city of Edo (now Tokyo) focused on imagery dealing with the city’s entertainment districts.  Prints were made about the theaters, restaurants, teahouses, and courtesans of the time, and they sold well because of the rising prosperity in the country.

Two of the most famous ukiyo-e printmakers from its earlier phase are Kitigawa Utamaro, and Suzuki Harunobu.  Harunobu is also attributed with producing the first successful multi-color prints. Color printing had been attempted for centuries and in other countries, but it wasn’t until the 1760’s in Japan that the first successful color printing method using a “kento” registration system was developed, and it was a major innovation that contributed to the popularity of woodcut prints in Japan.  The method required carving separate blocks for each color, which is different from the reductive color prints used by Picasso and other artists in the 20^th Century.

In the first half of the 19^th Century, the artists Hokusai and Hiroshige revitalized ukiyo-e relief prints by re-introducing the subject of landscapes into art.  Landscapes have a long history of being the highest form of art in many Asian cultures, and the rules associated with landscapes had caused them to be left out of ukiyo-e works that dealt with a ‘lower’ entertainment culture.  These two adopted landscapes back into their modern style and created what are some of the most famous Japanese prints today.

Hokusai’s “36 Views of Mt. Fuji” were first published in 1820.  Some of the images focus on Mt. Fuji, while many of them have dominant scenes in the foreground showing scenes of daily life in Japan.  Ten additional views were eventually added to the series, and two other notable print series by him are “The Waterfalls of the Provinces” and “The Views of Famous Bridges.”

 

Hiroshige’s most famous works are a series of 55 prints called “Tokaido Gojusantsugi.”  They show views from each of the 53 stations along the eastern sea road, a famous route between Edo to Kyoto along the Pacific Ocean, plus views from Edo and Kyoto.  Like Hokusai, Hiroshige also produced many large print series during his career.  Two of these series are “Toto Meisho” (Views of the Eastern Capital), and “Sixty-nine Posting Stations of the Kisokaido”, Kisokaido being the alternative route to the eastern sea road depicted in his earlier series.
 

Woodcuts moving into the 20^th Century

Unfortunately for Hokusai and Hiroshige, their innovative work did not have a lasting impact on the future of Japanese art.  However, it did go on to inspire European artists and audiences.  The French were the first Europeans to show interest in Japanese art, and at the first major exhibition of Japanese prints in Paris in 1867 the entire show sold out.  Two French artists, Felix Vallotton and Paul Gauguin, are thought to have been inspired by Japanese prints and began producing woodcut prints in the 1890’s.  They, along with Edvard Munch, are credited by some with revitalizing the medium of woodcut printing in western art, where it had been relatively forgotten since the 1700’s in the shadow of lithography and intaglio.  These three artists are thought to have inspired the German Expressionist group, Die Brucke, to produce many woodcut prints, who in turn inspired European artists from multiple movements to adopt the medium and allowed woodcut prints to grow and become a popular method of printing today.

 

 

A History of Intaglio Printing

Intaglio prints are created by engraving, scratching, or using acid to etch an image into a flat metal plate.  Ink is rubbed onto the entire surface of the plate and then carefully wiped off.  The flat, unmarked surfaces of the plate are wiped clean, leaving ink remaining in the recessed lines that have been created.  The ink is then transferred onto a sheet of damp paper by running it through an etching press, leaving an impression of the inked marks on the paper.

 

The roots of intaglio

It is thought that the intaglio process was developed out of plain metal engraving, which was well developed by the Middle Ages.  It was common for suits of armor, swords, and many other fine metal artifacts to have elaborate designs carved into the surface.  This work was done by skilled goldsmiths who were respected for their craft.  On occasion, the engravers wanted to keep a record of a design they did.  To do this, they rubbed a charcoal-chalk mixture into the grooves and pressed a piece of paper against it, creating an image of the engraved design.  It is likely that this idea led to the creation of intaglio printing.

Early intaglio printers

The name of the earliest intaglio printer is unknown.  He is referred to as “The Master of Playing Cards,” and produced the earliest known intaglio prints making decks of cards in 1440.  The earliest identifiable artist to use intaglio to create artworks was Martin Schongauer, a German.  The son of a goldsmith, Schongauer was innovative in his use of engraving by using cross-hatched marks to create volume, and his prints tried to imitate the paintings of the time.

 

He was an inspiration and predecessor to famed Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer, who in addition to creating some of the finest early woodcuts also did a number of intaglio prints.  He perfected the cross-hatching method begun by Schongauer and was also among the first to produce intaglio prints using the etching process, although he did not invent the method.  In engraving the lines are carved directly into the metal using a burin, while in etching the lines are drawn into an acid-resistant coating brushed onto the metal, which is then exposed to an acidic mixture that eats away at the exposed metal.  Etching processes were not advanced enough at the time to do quality prints compared to engraving, so it was not common for a print to be done entirely in etching, but there is evidence that etching was done on engraving plates, most likely to create faint preliminary guidelines for the engravers to follow.  

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Intaglio as an emerging commercial art process

In general, intaglio was the preferred method for fine artists of the time as opposed to woodblock prints, which were also gaining in popularity.  Woodblock prints were primarily developed by carpenters and other members of the lower class, and was held in lower regard than intaglio.  For this reason woodblock was used more for practical purposes such as printing for books and posters, while engraving was generally the printmaking method of choice among artists.  Two of the Italian Renaissance artists to do a significant amount of intaglio printing were Antonio Pollaiolo and Andrea Mantegna.  Mantegna was one of the first printers to develop the atelier system, where a team of craftsmen assists in creating printed works.  This was further developed by Rembrandt van Rijn and Rubens in the 17^th Century to fill larger demands for prints, and is the model of modern print shops today.

 

17^th Century intaglio printers

 

Of all intaglio prints before the 19^th Century, Rembrandt’s may be the most famous.  He produced more than 300 etchings during his career and was a pioneer in the use of drypoint technique.  His prints were almost all done using the etching method, and to intensify the darkness of some areas he would take the etching needle and physically scratch into the plate surface.  This raises a jagged, burred line, which holds a large amount of ink.  The only drawback to this technique is that the burr is pressed down with each run through the press, making it necessary to re-score these lines often so that the printed images remain consistent.

 

It was also during the 17^th Century that color was first introduced to the intaglio print.  Hercules Seghers, a contemporary of Rembrandt, achieved this by hand tinting the surface of the paper before printing the black etched lines on top of it.  Since then intaglio techniques such as aquatint have been developed which makes the actual printing of color layers in intaglio easier.

Other noteworthy printmakers from the 17^th Century were Jacques Callot and Anthony Van Dyck.  Callot was a prolific French printer whose most famous work is his series of intaglio prints titled “Les miseres de la guerre,” which makes an anti-war statement by depicting horrific war time scenes.  Van Dyck was a prominent member of a school of portraiture that began in the Netherlands and lasted up to the beginning of the 18^th Century.

 

Intaglio leading into the modern era

 

Through much of the 18^th Century the use of intaglio declined, and the most prominent artist to regularly use intaglio was Francisco de Goya of Spain.  Also well known as a painter, he used intaglio to print inflammatory satirical and anti-war images, which could be circulated among the population more easily than his paintings.

 

 

Goya

Intaglio continued to decline through the 19^th Century with wood engraving, lithography, and photography becoming more popular modes of creating replicable imagery.  Then in the first half of the 20^th Century intaglio was rediscovered by many famous artists.  Picasso alone produced hundreds of intaglio plates in his lifetime.  Since then intaglio has moved back into a more prominent position in the fine art world and has been used by artists in a wide range of methods and styles.

A History of Lithography

Lithography is very different from the other major printmaking processes because instead of physically changing a surface to create an image, it relies on a chemical change.  Lithography is done on a special piece of limestone that has the necessary properties for the process.  The stone is drawn and painted on with a greasy material, then etched with a mixture of gum arabic and nitric acid to stabilize the image.  During printing the surface of the stone is dampened with water and rolled with an oil-based ink.  The oily ink is attracted to the areas where the grease was applied (image area), and is repelled by other parts of the stone (non-image area).

 The quarries that produced this specific limestone for lithography have been empty for a long time, making the number of stones available today finite.  Alternative methods of lithography have been developed such as using aluminum and photo-sensitive metal plates, but these methods cannot replicate exactly what the stone is capable of.

The beginning of lithography  

 

Lithography is also different because it did not go through a centuries-long period of development as other printmaking processes did.  The process was invented by Alois Senefelder of Germany.  He had been experimenting with developing a stone printing process for a few years, but his first attempts were more similar to an engraving printing process.  Then one day, finding himself without a pen and paper, he wrote a laundry list on a piece of stone using a grease pencil.  From his observation of how the grease interacted with the stone, he went on to fully develop the lithographic process in 1798.

Lithography gaining popularity as a reproductive process

Senefelder was not an artist himself.  He was interested in using lithography for commercial purposes, particularly for printing sheet music. Lithography did go on to become heavily used for commercial purposes, and was also the basis of more modern offset printing, but it was also quickly picked up by artists.  

Fine art lithographs emerged in England as early as 1803 with the printing of the book “Specimens of Polyautography.”  The book’s publisher, Philipp Andre, attempted to persuade every major English artist to try lithography, and many of these artists contributed to his book.  Lithography was so new at the time that a single name had not even been established for the process, which is why Andre referred to it as ‘polyautography.’  People were also still experimenting with the process and discovering its possibilities.  In Andre’s book, all the prints were drawn in pen and ink, and the resulting works were thought of more as pen and ink drawings than print.  But soon grease crayons and pencils would become the most common method of drawing lithographs, and artists came to understand the unique look that the process had to offer.

Lithography’s ability to capture subtle shading and mark making gave it a drawn quality which was more similar to painting than any other print method, and for this reason it was used to make replications of famous paintings as early as 1810.  It replaced engraving, mezzotint, and soft ground etchings as the most common way to replicate works of art, and it took a while longer before lithographs were to be thought of as original works of art.

 

 

 Lithography becomes art

Because of its ability to imitate the gesture of drawings and paintings, many painters tried lithography, and two well-known French painters who used it often were Theodore Gericault and Eugene Delacriox.  Both are primarily known as painters, but they also produced dozens of lithographic works in their time.  Two other French artists who are well known for their lithographic works are Honore Daumier and Paul Gavarni.  Both of them illustrators, Daumier was the more famous of the two because of his inflammatory satirical cartoons mocking the king.  His two series “Caricature” in 1831 and “Charivari” in 1832 were very popular, and marked the alliance of lithography with the press, making it a powerful artistic medium in public life.  Lithography use began to wane in the last half of the 19^th Century with the invention of photography quickly becoming the preferred method of replicating images, and lithography took on a reduced role in society because of it.   

 

 

 

 

The three French artists named above are credited with maintaining the vitality in lithography that helped it take hold as a major artistic medium in the 20^th Century.  German contemporaries of the French artists exchanged ideas with them, and German impressionists such as Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, and Max Slevogt made lithographs which were eventually adopted by Kirchner, Beckmann, and other members of the Die Brucke expressionist group who became well-known for their woodblock prints as well.  

 

 

 

Lithography is reborn in the mid-20^th Century

 

Also early in the 20th century many American regionalist artists worked in lithography.  As in their paintings, artists such as John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton, and Grant Wood explored rural subjects in their areas.  However, the term regionalist refers to the fact that most of these artists had an appeal that was limited to their region, and their influence was not strong enough to inspire many more famous artists or collectors to become seriously interested in lithography.    

 

Lithography had a great revival with the establishment of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1960.  With a mission to “rescue the dying art of lithography,” June Wayne, Clinton Adams, and Garo Antreasian were granted funding by the Ford Foundation, and developed a plan to restore lithographic prints as a prestigious artistic pursuit.  After ten years of operation, Tamarind moved to Albuquerque and became affiliated with the University of New Mexico, where it remains today as the Tamarind Institute.  Thanks to their efforts, lithography was once again popularized within the artistic community and has been used by a countless number of artists from all skill levels over the last 50 years.

 

 

 

 

 

A History of Serigraphy

Serigraphy, or screen printing as it is often called, is unique among the printmaking processes because it is the only process that has a practical commercial purpose today.  Yet it also arguably has the oldest roots of all the printmaking traditions. In modern screen printing, areas of a synthetic fiber screen are blocked out, creating open, exposed shapes in the screen.  Ink is then pulled over the surface of the entire screen, and the open areas allow the ink to pass through the screen to the paper on the other side.  This process can also be done on fabric or any other flat surface, and can use either a water or oil based ink.

The roots of serigraphy

Serigraphy is essentially a form of stenciling, which can be traced back to the handprint images created by prehistoric peoples in caves as far back as 30,000 B.C.E.  In these examples, a fine dust of pigment was blown over a hand as it was pressed against the wall of a cave, leaving an image of the hand outlined in a colored form.  Some more modern cultures that are thought to have used stenciling are the ancient Fiji Islanders who used the patterns of worm-eaten bamboo leaves to decorate their garments, and the ancient Romans who taught children how to write by tracing letter stencils.  In both these societies, the stencils were made out frail materials, so the stencils and much of the work they created do not exist today.

Examples of more advanced stenciling can be found in China and Japan between the years 500 and 1000.  Of the most advanced techniques during this time, the Japanese were able to overcome the problem of having “Floaters” in the stencil through the Yuzen style of stenciling. “Floaters” are created when part of an image or design is separated from the main portion of the plane, such as the enclosed areas of the letters “O”,”P”,”R”, and “B”.  Without cutting connections for these pieces these areas would fall out of the stencil, but the Yuzen style overcame this problem by gluing hairs in place so that these disconnected areas to “float” in place without creating a visible line in the impression. This allowed for cleaner looking prints, as well as more complex designs.

A crude form of serigraphy also appeared in the Middle Ages in Europe.    To create multiple images of the cross on the armor of the Knights of the Crusades, an open-weave cloth was stretched over a wooden hoop, and tar was applied to outline the shape of the cross so that ink could be passed through to create the image.  Up to this point most stenciling done by applying colors with a brush, and it wasn’t until the late 1800’s that Serigraphy became perfected as a useful commercial process, and eventually it became accepted as a form of art as well.

Serigraphy as a commercial process

The first modern serigraphs where a stencil was created by blocking out areas of a fine-mesh screen emerged in Germany and the Lyons district of France around 1870, and the first patent for using silk as the screen material was granted to Samuel Simon of Manchester, England, in 1907.  Then seven years later in San Francisco, commercial artist John Pilsworth perfected and patented a multicolor printing process he called Selectasine.  It was a simple method similar to a reductive woodblock print, where on a single screen the printer would block out more area for each color, allowing portions of the previous layers to remain exposed on the print.  During this era the most common use of serigraphy was the making of signs and textiles, and many small operations were developing their own serigraphy methods and protecting them as trade secrets.

20^th Century developments in serigraphy

However, it was not long before the process was considered public property, and the use and development of serigraphy took off rapidly.  Innovations in serigraphy during this time period came so fast that the automated serigraphy machine, invented in 1925, was unusable for years.  It made prints too fast for the ink to dry, but the industry at the time was so relatively small that paint manufacturers did not develop faster-drying inks for some time.

The first successful photo-processed serigraph was made in 1915, but it would also be a few decades before photo-process stencils gained widespread use.  In the meantime, a knife-cut stencil called Profilm was developed in 1929 by Louis D’Autremont.  With Profilm, a design was cut into the material, and then the backing was peeled off to reveal an adhesive side which stuck the stencil to the screen.  It was a popular choice among serigraphers because it eliminated the ragged edges seen in earlier printing methods, and an improved form of the material called Nufilm developed soon after in the 1930’s.

Serigraphy becomes art

It was also during the Great Depression that serigraphy was first used in fine art, done under a WPA project headed by Anthony Velonis.  He turned dozens of contemporary artists on to the medium through his project, and one of them, Guy McCoy, would have the first solo exhibition of serigraphs at the Contemporary Art Gallery in New York in 1938.

The other major figure in serigraphy during the decade was Carl Zigrosser, the print curator for the Philadelphia Art Museum.  He is known as the first person to use the term ‘serigraph’ (seri-, meaning ‘silk’, and graph-, meaning “to draw’), and worked to interest artists, collectors, galleries, museums, and the public in the medium.

 

Through the efforts of Zigrosser and Velonis, and thanks to the many innovations in the process, serigraphy gained widespread use both commercially and artistically by the 1940’s.  The National Serigraph Society was formed in 1940 and was responsible for arranging hundreds of shows for its members all around the world, and another large organization of the decade was the Screen Process Printing Association, formed in 1948.

What are perhaps the most famous serigraphic works of art ever were produced soon after in the 1950’s and 60’s.  Pop and contemporary artists of the time were drawn to serigraphy for its conceptual and visual properties as a commercial process, and it can often be seen in the works of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Ronald Kitaj, and Joe Tilson.  From this time on serigraphy has continued to be used by a countless number of artists in their work, and it is the only printmaking process that still has a practical use as a commercial process.  Screen printing is a common method of creating t-shirt and other clothing designs today, and it is also sometimes used in small-run poster productions.