Making art is filled with mystery. The arcane and complicated processes used to make prints, the imagination that leads to the work, and the centuries of history in the buying and selling of art are filled with mystery. But buying art should not by mysterious. This page aims to answer some of common questions that art buyers have.
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Printmaking Terms
Intaglio is a type of printing in which cuts are made into a metal plate. The word “Intaglio” means “incising” in Italian.
Intaglio printing, which emerged in the 1500s, was a major development in print-making. Before then, prints were generally made by relief cuts. In other words, material would be removed from the plate and the areas of the plate which were left remaining would be inked and pressed on the paper. The result is generally an even coating of paint on the paper. With intaglio printing, however, variations in the depth and width of the cut allows the artist to control the amount of ink deposited on the paper, creating far more expressive works.
Intaglios are distinguished by their three-dimensionality. The pressure of the printing press pushing the paper onto the plate causes the ink to be raised up from the surface of the paper.
Intaglio prints can be made by etching or engraving the plate.
Softground etching is a form of etching in which tallow is added to the ground before it is spread on the plate. The tallow prevents the ground from fully hardening. A sheet of paper is laid over the ground. The artist then draws on the paper and then lifts it up. When the artist drew, the ground adheres to the paper and is pulled off the plate. Unlike the lines created in the typical scratching away at the ground, the lines created with a softground etching are rough because the ground is not pulled away cleanly. It leaves a crayon-like edge.
Artists using softground etching can vary the amount of pressure that they apply to the paper, affecting how much of the ground is removed, as well as the width of the pencil with which the image is drawn.
In the Twentieth Century, softground etching found a renaissance as artists realized that found objects, like leaves, could be pressed into the ground.
A collotype is a type of print in which a glass or metal plate is covered with a light-sensitive substance. The substance is exposed to an image on a negative, much like a photograph, which modifies the substance on the plate and, in turn, creates the image. The image would vary in hardness according to the amount of light that reached it through the negative. The softer areas accepted more ink. Collotypes were first employed for fine art photographs in the United States by Alfred Stieglitz.
Photogravure is an intaglio printmaking process in which a copper plate coated with a light-sensitive gelatin tissue is exposed to light which is shined through a film negative (just as is done when printing a photograph. The light degrades the gelatin tissue. The plate is then washed with acid. The acid etches the copper where and to the extent that the light impacted the gelatin. It reproduces very well the deep and continuous pools of gray and black in the photograph.
A silkscreen is a type of print which is made through the use of a mesh cloth stretched over a heavy wooden frame. The cloth is highly permeable, but the artist applies paint, tusche, glue, or other material to block paint from passing through areas of the cloth. The artist then uses a squeegee to press paint through the cloth (except, of course, where the resist was applied), creating an image on the paper. Silkscreen artists usually repeat the process with additional screens, using other colors, to build an intricate and colorful image.
Clayton Pond was a mid-century New York artist who invented new ways of silkscreening which yielded uniquely vibrant and lustrous pictures.
A wood engraving is a print made by cutting an image into the end grain of a piece of wood. It is different from a “woodcut“, in which the image is cut into the face of the board, though often people refer to all prints made by cutting into wood as a “woodcut”.
To make the print on the paper, the artist applies ink to the face of the block of wood and presses the paper onto the inked wood. The area that was cut away leaves no ink on the paper.
Woodcut is one of the earliest forms of print-making, used in China as early as the Fifth Century CE. Wood engraving is generally thought to have been invented only in the late Eighteenth Century, commonly attributed to Thomas Bewick.
Some important wood engravers include Honoré Daumier, Leonard Baskin, M.C. Escher, Barbara Howard, Howard Pyle, and Rockwell Kent.
A woodcut is a print made by cutting an image into a board. (Technically, a “woodcut” is a print made by cutting the image into the face of the board and is different from a “wood engraving“, in which the image is cut into the endgrain of the wood, though often people refer to all prints made by cutting into wood as a “woodcut”.) Woodcut is one of the earliest forms of print-making, used in China as early as the Fifth Century CE. Albrecht Dürer was one of the most famous printmakers who used woodcut, working at at a time that is often thought of as the pinnacle of woodcut work.
Traditionally, woodcut was made using fine-grain woods, which allowed the artist the freedom to guide the cutting. In the Twentieth Century, artists like Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin began experimenting, using coarse-grained woods and softwoods (with prominent wide-spaced grains that would guide the cutting tool).
Leonard Baskin is one of the greatest of the modern woodcut artists, creating works of enormous expressiveness.
Aquatint is a method of achieving gradations of tone through a very fine network of lines or dots on the plate. However, the lines and dots in the aquatint are formed through a different technique than is used with an etching, in which the image is formed by scratching through the ground.
The artist making an aquatint forms the image through the application of the ground itself, instead of applying a ground over the entire plate and removing the portions that are to be acid-etched.
To start, the artist selects a material for the ground which is capable of being reduced to fine particles, of being well-fixed to the polished-copper plate, and of resisting acid. The most commonly used grounds for aquatint have been resin (such as from pine trees) and asphalt. The artist scatters this material on portions of the plate as a ground-up dust and then heats it, causing the material to melt and stick to the plate. Alternatively, the material might be dissolved in alcohol and poured onto the plate, whereupon the alcohol evaporates, leaving behind the dissolved ground, but typically with a pattern of cracks like dried mud on a floor. In either case, the ground which remains adhered to the plate leaves a pattern of dots and cracks. It is in those areas, where the acid will etch the exposed plate, creating the etching which will then be inked and pressed on the paper.
Aquatint got its name because it was developed in the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century, when watercolors were enormously popular, because this technique allowed the etcher to imitate the effect of a watercolor wash.
An engraving is a method of printmaking in which a sharp steel tool called a burin is used to cut slivers out of a metal plate (usually copper) to create an image. The plate will be inked and then the ink will be wiped off of the plate but left in the grooves. A damp piece of paper is laid over the inked plate and a press squeezes the paper hard onto the plate, pressing the paper fibers into the grooves. This both creates an image on the paper and also embosses the paper. Engravings typically have a very pronounced three-dimensionality to them.
Some artists, like Bernard Childs, make deep cuts into the plate, with the result being deep wells of ink and a very significant shaping of the paper. Childs was interesting for another reason: Like many artists, Childs was a curious person, an innovator. He came up with the idea of cutting into the plate using power tools. He used those tools with great success—but also with great noise. In fact, his widow, Judith Childs, told me that when she met Stanley Hayter in the 1970s, he immediately recognized her name and cursed at the noisiness of the machines that Bernard used when Bernard spent time in Hayter’s Atelier 17!
An etching is a print in which the image on paper is created by pressing an etched plate against the paper.
The plate is etched through a complex multistep process. The short explanation of the process is as follows: First, the artist coats a metal plate with an oil-based material. This coating is called the “ground”. Next, the artist scratches the ground to create the image that he or she desires. Finally, the artist washes the work with acid. The water-based acid beads up on the coating because oil and water don’t mix, leaving the acid to etch the plate where the coating has been removed by the artist. The ground is removed from the plate and the plate can then be used with a press to create the picture.
In some cases, the acid is applied directly to the plate without any application of a coating using methods such as open bite, brush bite, and spit bite.
Chine-collé is a printmaking technique in which a super-fine, thin paper is run through the printing press glued to a heavier support sheet. The process allows the print to be made on a very delicate surface, such as Japanese paper or linen, that pulls finer details off the plate, creates a subtle, delicate backdrop to the printed image, and creates a collage effect.
Chine is the French word for China, referring to the fact that the thin paper originally used with this technique was imported from China. Collé is the French word for “glued.”
Everyone’s heard of oil paints and acrylics—but what is “gouache”?
Gouache (which is pronounced /gwash/) is a paint made by dissolving ground pigments in water and then thickened with a glue-like substance (usually gum arabic or yellow dextrin). It is applied like oils and acrylics but like watercolors it tends to be absorbed into the paper on which it is painted. Unlike watercolors, it can also be applied to make bold, flat, and completely opaque colors. Gouache has been used for well over 1000 years, but it became popular for commercial artists in the 20th century because it photographed well and could be used to make crisp images and lettering (particularly when mixed with an acrylic binder instead of gum arabic). The term is French, derived from the Italian word “guazzo”.
Manière noire is a print-making technique in which the plate is directly scratched with a wire brush or other device or by ruling closely-set parallel lines in several directions on the ground before etching. Its purpose and effect is to produce an overall texture.
Mezzotint is an engraving technique developed in the seventeenth century which allows for the creation of prints with soft gradations of tone and rich, velvety, and deep blacks.
Mezzotint is created by engraving a copper or steel plate by rocking a toothed metal tool across the surface to prick the entire surface with small holes. Each small hole will hold ink, and if printed at this stage the image would be solid black. But the printmaker creates dark and light tones by rubbing down or burnishing the rough surface to various degrees of smoothness to reduce the ink-holding capacity of areas of the plate. It is a monochrome printmaking process of the intaglio family that yields half-tones without using line- or dot-based techniques like hatching, cross-hatching, or stipple. It was much used in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries, especially for the reproduction of paintings.
Etchings and engravings are both methods of creating art with the use of a plate in a printing press. And in both, the plate has grooves that hold the ink.
The difference is in the making of those grooves.
In an etching, the artist typically scratches through a coating applied to the face of the plate. Acid is then applied to the plate. The oil-based coating resists the water-based acid wash. The areas of the plate that are exposed by the artist’s scratches get etched by the acid. In an engraving, though, the artist puts the scratches, grooves, and gouges directly in the plate.
An additional difference is the visual impact of these two methods. The direct engraving of the plate allows the artist to vary the depth and weight of the cut such that the resultant image is substantially three-dimensional.
Types of Prints
Intaglio is a type of printing in which cuts are made into a metal plate. The word “Intaglio” means “incising” in Italian.
Intaglio printing, which emerged in the 1500s, was a major development in print-making. Before then, prints were generally made by relief cuts. In other words, material would be removed from the plate and the areas of the plate which were left remaining would be inked and pressed on the paper. The result is generally an even coating of paint on the paper. With intaglio printing, however, variations in the depth and width of the cut allows the artist to control the amount of ink deposited on the paper, creating far more expressive works.
Intaglios are distinguished by their three-dimensionality. The pressure of the printing press pushing the paper onto the plate causes the ink to be raised up from the surface of the paper.
Intaglio prints can be made by etching or engraving the plate.
Softground etching is a form of etching in which tallow is added to the ground before it is spread on the plate. The tallow prevents the ground from fully hardening. A sheet of paper is laid over the ground. The artist then draws on the paper and then lifts it up. When the artist drew, the ground adheres to the paper and is pulled off the plate. Unlike the lines created in the typical scratching away at the ground, the lines created with a softground etching are rough because the ground is not pulled away cleanly. It leaves a crayon-like edge.
Artists using softground etching can vary the amount of pressure that they apply to the paper, affecting how much of the ground is removed, as well as the width of the pencil with which the image is drawn.
In the Twentieth Century, softground etching found a renaissance as artists realized that found objects, like leaves, could be pressed into the ground.
A collotype is a type of print in which a glass or metal plate is covered with a light-sensitive substance. The substance is exposed to an image on a negative, much like a photograph, which modifies the substance on the plate and, in turn, creates the image. The image would vary in hardness according to the amount of light that reached it through the negative. The softer areas accepted more ink. Collotypes were first employed for fine art photographs in the United States by Alfred Stieglitz.
Photogravure is an intaglio printmaking process in which a copper plate coated with a light-sensitive gelatin tissue is exposed to light which is shined through a film negative (just as is done when printing a photograph. The light degrades the gelatin tissue. The plate is then washed with acid. The acid etches the copper where and to the extent that the light impacted the gelatin. It reproduces very well the deep and continuous pools of gray and black in the photograph.
A silkscreen is a type of print which is made through the use of a mesh cloth stretched over a heavy wooden frame. The cloth is highly permeable, but the artist applies paint, tusche, glue, or other material to block paint from passing through areas of the cloth. The artist then uses a squeegee to press paint through the cloth (except, of course, where the resist was applied), creating an image on the paper. Silkscreen artists usually repeat the process with additional screens, using other colors, to build an intricate and colorful image.
Clayton Pond was a mid-century New York artist who invented new ways of silkscreening which yielded uniquely vibrant and lustrous pictures.
A wood engraving is a print made by cutting an image into the end grain of a piece of wood. It is different from a “woodcut“, in which the image is cut into the face of the board, though often people refer to all prints made by cutting into wood as a “woodcut”.
To make the print on the paper, the artist applies ink to the face of the block of wood and presses the paper onto the inked wood. The area that was cut away leaves no ink on the paper.
Woodcut is one of the earliest forms of print-making, used in China as early as the Fifth Century CE. Wood engraving is generally thought to have been invented only in the late Eighteenth Century, commonly attributed to Thomas Bewick.
Some important wood engravers include Honoré Daumier, Leonard Baskin, M.C. Escher, Barbara Howard, Howard Pyle, and Rockwell Kent.
A woodcut is a print made by cutting an image into a board. (Technically, a “woodcut” is a print made by cutting the image into the face of the board and is different from a “wood engraving“, in which the image is cut into the endgrain of the wood, though often people refer to all prints made by cutting into wood as a “woodcut”.) Woodcut is one of the earliest forms of print-making, used in China as early as the Fifth Century CE. Albrecht Dürer was one of the most famous printmakers who used woodcut, working at at a time that is often thought of as the pinnacle of woodcut work.
Traditionally, woodcut was made using fine-grain woods, which allowed the artist the freedom to guide the cutting. In the Twentieth Century, artists like Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin began experimenting, using coarse-grained woods and softwoods (with prominent wide-spaced grains that would guide the cutting tool).
Leonard Baskin is one of the greatest of the modern woodcut artists, creating works of enormous expressiveness.
Aquatint is a method of achieving gradations of tone through a very fine network of lines or dots on the plate. However, the lines and dots in the aquatint are formed through a different technique than is used with an etching, in which the image is formed by scratching through the ground.
The artist making an aquatint forms the image through the application of the ground itself, instead of applying a ground over the entire plate and removing the portions that are to be acid-etched.
To start, the artist selects a material for the ground which is capable of being reduced to fine particles, of being well-fixed to the polished-copper plate, and of resisting acid. The most commonly used grounds for aquatint have been resin (such as from pine trees) and asphalt. The artist scatters this material on portions of the plate as a ground-up dust and then heats it, causing the material to melt and stick to the plate. Alternatively, the material might be dissolved in alcohol and poured onto the plate, whereupon the alcohol evaporates, leaving behind the dissolved ground, but typically with a pattern of cracks like dried mud on a floor. In either case, the ground which remains adhered to the plate leaves a pattern of dots and cracks. It is in those areas, where the acid will etch the exposed plate, creating the etching which will then be inked and pressed on the paper.
Aquatint got its name because it was developed in the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century, when watercolors were enormously popular, because this technique allowed the etcher to imitate the effect of a watercolor wash.
An engraving is a method of printmaking in which a sharp steel tool called a burin is used to cut slivers out of a metal plate (usually copper) to create an image. The plate will be inked and then the ink will be wiped off of the plate but left in the grooves. A damp piece of paper is laid over the inked plate and a press squeezes the paper hard onto the plate, pressing the paper fibers into the grooves. This both creates an image on the paper and also embosses the paper. Engravings typically have a very pronounced three-dimensionality to them.
Some artists, like Bernard Childs, make deep cuts into the plate, with the result being deep wells of ink and a very significant shaping of the paper. Childs was interesting for another reason: Like many artists, Childs was a curious person, an innovator. He came up with the idea of cutting into the plate using power tools. He used those tools with great success—but also with great noise. In fact, his widow, Judith Childs, told me that when she met Stanley Hayter in the 1970s, he immediately recognized her name and cursed at the noisiness of the machines that Bernard used when Bernard spent time in Hayter’s Atelier 17!
An etching is a print in which the image on paper is created by pressing an etched plate against the paper.
The plate is etched through a complex multistep process. The short explanation of the process is as follows: First, the artist coats a metal plate with an oil-based material. This coating is called the “ground”. Next, the artist scratches the ground to create the image that he or she desires. Finally, the artist washes the work with acid. The water-based acid beads up on the coating because oil and water don’t mix, leaving the acid to etch the plate where the coating has been removed by the artist. The ground is removed from the plate and the plate can then be used with a press to create the picture.
In some cases, the acid is applied directly to the plate without any application of a coating using methods such as open bite, brush bite, and spit bite.
Chine-collé is a printmaking technique in which a super-fine, thin paper is run through the printing press glued to a heavier support sheet. The process allows the print to be made on a very delicate surface, such as Japanese paper or linen, that pulls finer details off the plate, creates a subtle, delicate backdrop to the printed image, and creates a collage effect.
Chine is the French word for China, referring to the fact that the thin paper originally used with this technique was imported from China. Collé is the French word for “glued.”
Everyone’s heard of oil paints and acrylics—but what is “gouache”?
Gouache (which is pronounced /gwash/) is a paint made by dissolving ground pigments in water and then thickened with a glue-like substance (usually gum arabic or yellow dextrin). It is applied like oils and acrylics but like watercolors it tends to be absorbed into the paper on which it is painted. Unlike watercolors, it can also be applied to make bold, flat, and completely opaque colors. Gouache has been used for well over 1000 years, but it became popular for commercial artists in the 20th century because it photographed well and could be used to make crisp images and lettering (particularly when mixed with an acrylic binder instead of gum arabic). The term is French, derived from the Italian word “guazzo”.
Manière noire is a print-making technique in which the plate is directly scratched with a wire brush or other device or by ruling closely-set parallel lines in several directions on the ground before etching. Its purpose and effect is to produce an overall texture.
Mezzotint is an engraving technique developed in the seventeenth century which allows for the creation of prints with soft gradations of tone and rich, velvety, and deep blacks.
Mezzotint is created by engraving a copper or steel plate by rocking a toothed metal tool across the surface to prick the entire surface with small holes. Each small hole will hold ink, and if printed at this stage the image would be solid black. But the printmaker creates dark and light tones by rubbing down or burnishing the rough surface to various degrees of smoothness to reduce the ink-holding capacity of areas of the plate. It is a monochrome printmaking process of the intaglio family that yields half-tones without using line- or dot-based techniques like hatching, cross-hatching, or stipple. It was much used in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries, especially for the reproduction of paintings.
Etchings and engravings are both methods of creating art with the use of a plate in a printing press. And in both, the plate has grooves that hold the ink.
The difference is in the making of those grooves.
In an etching, the artist typically scratches through a coating applied to the face of the plate. Acid is then applied to the plate. The oil-based coating resists the water-based acid wash. The areas of the plate that are exposed by the artist’s scratches get etched by the acid. In an engraving, though, the artist puts the scratches, grooves, and gouges directly in the plate.
An additional difference is the visual impact of these two methods. The direct engraving of the plate allows the artist to vary the depth and weight of the cut such that the resultant image is substantially three-dimensional.