Simply Print-Process

Processes

Relief

Lithography

Intaglio

Monotype

Relief Printing consists of Woodcut, Linoleum Cut, Letterpress, Collograph, and any process in which the printing surface is cut away so that the image area alone remains raised on the surface.

Ink is rolled across the surface of the matrix and the raised areas receive ink while the areas that have been cut away do not. Wood or linoleum are most commonly used.

The earliest printmaking technique was woodcut, which first appeared in China in the ninth century. It arose in Europe around 1400 and was originally used foe stamping designs onto fabrics, textiles, or playing cards. By the sixteenth century it had achieved the status of an important art form with the work of Albrecht Dürer and other Nothern European artists. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the woodcut underwent a major revival.

Lithographs are printed from polished slabs of limestone or aluminum plates that have been drawn on by the artist with greasy crayons and washes. Once the drawing is complete the printing surface is chemically treated to secure the image.

The areas that have not been drawn on will then hold water and repel the oil-based printing ink and the drawn areas will hold ink and repel water since oil and water will not mix. The stone or plate can then be damped with water and inked with a roller coated with ink, so impressions of the image can be made.

Literally translated from Greek, it means stone (litho) writing (graph). Its discovery was documented by its inventor, Alois Senefelder in 1796. The process has evolved into offset lithography, a high speed commercial printing process that is used to print a wide variety of materials including books, agazines, and newspapers.

Intaglio comes from the Italian word intagliare meaning “to incise.” Intaglio is the general term used for any process in which ink is held beneath the surface of a metal plate in incised or etched lines or marks. Plates are printed by working ink into the entire surface, which is then wiped clean.

Dampened paper is pressed into the plate with a press forcing the ink onto the paper, while embossing the mark of the plate and its surface. Copper, zinc and steel are most commonly used.

Etching is one of many intaglio techniques (along with engraving, drypoint, mezzotint, and aquatint). It was first developed in the early sixteenth century, after it was discovered that acid could be used to incise an image into a metal plate. Rembrant van Rijn, Francisco Goy, and Pablo Picasso, among others, have used the techiniques to create some of their most important works. Etching is essentially a linear medium, in which the composition is constructed by a network of lines.

Screen Printing, also know as serigraphy and erroneously as silkscreen, is essentially a stencil process. First a ﬁne mesh of synthetic fabric is stretched around a frame. Then an image is created on the screen by directly drawing on the screen or, more commonly, by coating the screen with a light-sensitive emulsion which will capture the image. The areas that will not print will be blocked out with these materials leaving the image areas open for ink to pass through them.

Ink is poured onto the screen and a squeegee is used to force the ink through the openings in the screen on to a substrate which can be paper or any other smooth material.

During the 1930s, a number of American artists began making artworks in screenprint, and by the end of that decade the term “serigraph” was devised to distinguish artists’ screenprints from commercial examples. During the 1960s, screenprinting came into greater prominence, particularly due to the Pop artists, who were attracted to its bold areas of unmodulated color, its flat surfaces, and its generally commercial look.

A monotype is essentially a printed painting. Ink is applied to a plate, which is typically plexiglas, by painting or by using rollers, and then printed to a sheet of paper. The image is unique, hence ‘mono’ meaning ‘one’, although a faint ‘ghost’ impression can be printed the second time through the press.

A monoprint may incorporate monotype techniques, but also employs an image printed from a matrix such as a lithograph, woodcut, etching, etc. Although a series of monoprints contains a repeated image, they have varied in some way to make each one unique rather than essentially alike one another.

Monotyping produces a unique print, or monotype; most of the ink is removed during the initial pressing. Although subsequent reprintings are sometimes possible, they differ greatly from the first print and are generally considered inferior. These prints from the original plate are called "ghost prints." A print made by pressing a new print onto another surface, effectively making the print into a plate, is called a "cognate". Stencils, watercolor, solvents, brushes, and other tools are often used to embellish a monotype print. Monotypes can be spontaneously executed and with no previous sketch.