How Printmaking Creates Repeatable Images

A matrix is the prepared surface that holds or controls the image. It might be a wood block, metal plate, stone, screen or sheet of linoleum. The artist works on this surface, adds ink and presses it against paper or another material.

The printed image is often reversed because the matrix transfers its design like a stamp. Artists must plan letters, directions and composition with that reversal in mind. Test prints help reveal what the final image will look like and which areas need further work.

Printmaking allows an artist to create an edition, a group of impressions made from the same matrix. The prints are related originals rather than ordinary photocopies. Artists may number and sign an edition, but they can also change colour, paper or pressure between impressions.

In relief printing, the artist cuts away areas that should remain unprinted. Ink sits on the raised surface and transfers to the paper. Woodcuts and linocuts use this method. Broad shapes, carved marks and strong contrasts are common, although highly detailed work is possible.

In intaglio printing, lines or textures are cut, scratched or etched into a metal plate. Ink fills the recessed areas, and the surface is wiped clean. Damp paper is pressed into the grooves under strong pressure, lifting out the ink. Engraving and etching are intaglio methods.

Lithography works through the different behaviour of grease and water on a flat surface. Screen printing pushes ink through open areas of a stencil held on mesh. Each method creates its own textures and practical limits, so the process influences the final visual language. Relief blocks can also be cut away after each colour is printed in a reduction process. The same block produces every layer, so earlier stages cannot be restored once more material has been removed. Planning matters because the matrix slowly disappears as the image develops.

Printmaking often requires thinking in layers. A multicolour image may use a separate block, plate or screen for each colour. Every layer must line up through a process called registration. A small shift can ruin precision or create an energetic doubled edge, depending on whether the artist planned it or is trying to sound confident afterwards.

Artists can explore several choices:

• •Change ink colour between impressions.
• •Print on different papers or fabrics.
• •Vary pressure to alter texture.
• •Combine several matrices in layers.
• •Add drawing or paint after printing.

Look at the lower margin of a traditional fine art print and you will often find pencil marks. A fraction such as 12/50 means the sheet belongs to an edition of fifty, and the first number identifies that impression. It does not always record the order of printing, because sheets are often numbered after drying and sorting. A few extra impressions may be marked A/P for artist's proof, or labelled as trial or state proofs, which record the image at earlier stages of work.

Editions are limited partly by choice and partly by the matrix itself. Some surfaces wear with use. In drypoint, the ragged metal ridge thrown up by the needle holds rich ink at first but flattens after relatively few impressions, so later prints look paler. Printers in the nineteenth century learned to coat copper plates with a thin layer of harder metal by electroplating, which extended their life. When an edition is finished, an artist may cancel the plate by scoring lines across it, so any later impression is clearly marked as a restrike.

Some of the most famous prints ever made came from Japan between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. These ukiyo-e prints, often translated as pictures of the floating world, showed actors, beauties, landscapes and city life. They were usually made by a team rather than one artist. A publisher commissioned and sold the work, a designer drew the image, a skilled carver cut it into cherry wood blocks, and a printer brushed water-based colours onto each block and rubbed the paper by hand with a flat pad called a baren, without using a press.

Each colour needed its own block, and small marks cut into the corners of every block helped the printer place the paper in exactly the same position each time. Katsushika Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa, from a series of views of Mount Fuji, was printed in large numbers and sold cheaply. When Japanese prints reached Europe in quantity in the later nineteenth century, artists were struck by their flat colour, bold outlines and unusual viewpoints. Vincent van Gogh collected them and painted copies of prints by Hiroshige, and the craze became known as Japonisme.

Before photography, prints were the main way an image could travel. In 1515 an Indian rhinoceros arrived in Lisbon, the first seen alive in Europe since Roman times. The German artist Albrecht Dürer never saw it. Working from a written description and a sketch sent from Portugal, he designed a woodcut showing the animal covered in what look like riveted plates of armour, with scaly legs and a small extra horn twisted on its back. The image was striking, confident and partly wrong, and it was printed in large numbers.

Because the woodblock could produce impressions again and again, Dürer's rhinoceros spread across Europe, appearing in books and copied by other artists for around two centuries. Many people treated it as an accurate picture long after real rhinoceroses had been seen and drawn more carefully. The story shows a power of printmaking that is easy to forget. A repeatable matrix can fix an image in public memory, whether its details are right or not, much as a widely shared photograph or diagram can today.

Lithography was invented in Bavaria in the 1790s by Alois Senefelder, a playwright looking for a cheap way to print his own work. He found that a fine-grained local limestone could hold a drawing made in greasy crayon or ink. After drawing, the printer treats the stone with a solution of gum arabic and a little acid, which helps the bare areas hold a thin film of water while the greasy marks stay water-repellent. Nothing is carved away. The image and the blank areas sit on the same flat surface, separated only by their chemistry, which is why lithography is called a planographic process.

To print, the stone is dampened and then rolled with oily ink. Water clings to the blank areas and repels the ink, while the greasy drawing accepts it. Paper is pressed against the stone, and the process is repeated for each impression. Because artists could draw directly with crayon or brush, lithographs could capture soft shading and free, sketchy lines that would be laborious to engrave. In the 1890s Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec used colour lithography for bold posters advertising Paris cabarets. The same principle survives in offset printing, where an inked metal plate transfers its image to a rubber blanket and then to paper, producing many books and magazines today.

Printmaking creates images by transferring ink from a prepared matrix. Relief, intaglio, lithography and screen printing each control ink in a different way. The repeatable process lets artists balance careful planning with the small variations that make each impression worth looking at closely.