So what is printmaking, and what is a printmaker? The answer is in the word - a printmaker is someone who, well, makes prints. Ahh the conundrum! This doesn’t help anyone who has never been exposed to the medium. Most people have heard of an “etching”, but they wouldn’t really know how that etching was created. And herein lays the problem with the term printmaking. Those naive to the medium do not fully understand, and therefore don’t appreciate, the time consuming and physical effort involved in creating art on a piece of paper. That piece of paper carries a hidden story, which is literally a journey. The journey starts with the idea and ends with a piece of paper, it’s what happens in between that is truly magical.
In simple terms, printmaking is the reproduction of multiple identical images from a single substrate. This substrate is commonly a metal plate or a piece of lino, and printmakers will refer to the substrate simply as “plates”. Printmaking is all about inking the substrate with ink, and then transferring the ink to paper using pressure to get the resulting image. How the plate is inked, and how the pressure is applied depends on the plate material and which technique you use.
There are two printmaking techniques which you should commit to memory: Intaglio (pronounced in-tah-lio, silent “g”) and Relief.
INTAGLIO PRINTMAKING
Intaglio processes require a printing press (just think rolling pin, but with enough pressure to break and flatten bones - don’t quote me on that). Intaglio methods are where scratches/grooves/etchings are made in the plate. The plate is covered in ink in such a way to make sure the ink is pushed into the grooves. But you only want to print where the grooves are, so you need to clean off the ink on the flat surfaces. This is where the whole wiping process takes place and can be pretty labour intensive. A flat palm of the hand and a thin smooth piece of paper is used to wipe the ink off in such a way that it doesn’t disturb the ink in the grooves, usually circular motions are used and in a way that reminds me of trying to polish a surface. At the end of the wiping process, the surface of the plate should be clean with ink left only in the grooves. The image is transferred to the paper using high pressure that essentially pushes the paper into the grooves which pick up the ink. A printing press is used to achieve this pressure. The plate is placed face up on the on the press bed, paper is placed on top of this plate, and then felt blankets are placed on top of the paper. Then this “felt-paper-plate” sandwich is rolled between two pins which squishes the paper into all the tiny minuscule depressions in the plate where the ink is. When it comes out the other side of the rolling pins, you very carefully pull away the felt blanket and then the paper, and voila: you have your print!
The intaglio method requires the paper to be damp to enable the movement of fibres into the microscopic grooves, and requires specialty printmaking paper that has long fibres that enables it to be dampened without dissintegrating and has directional stability, so it stretches and shrinks uniformly in all directions in response to being wet.
RELIEF PRINTMAKING
This method is the opposite to intaglio, where you ink the surfaces that are left to make the image (there’s no removal of ink in this process). Linocuts and woodcuts are a relief printmaking method. You carve away areas that you don’t want to print, and the surface areas left are inked up and transferred to paper. Relief methods don’t require the need for a printing press as you can transfer the image by placing a thin piece of printmaking paper on the blocks and rub/burnish the back of the paper with what’s called a barren to transfer the ink. For thicker papers you’d need more pressure and that’s where a press is useful.
Historically printmaking was not an art form, it was a trade that provided people with their books and newspapers. The modern day equivalent is our humble toner/inkjet printers. Anyone who prepares a simple word document on a computer and prints it out has essentially created a print. They can print this word document 50 times, each being identical, edition it, destroy the original word document, and voila! You have created a limited edition print!