The history of
printmaking
By Katie Friel
Variations of printmaking have been used by people for
thousands upon thousands of years. It has a long history with many different
cultures using it in different ways and discovering new techniques. From
Britain to Rome, to China this form of art has been discovered and copied
throughout history, forever adaption to social change and conflict, and these
days have being updated for modern times. In fine art, printmaking is something
that is widely used creatively for artistic purposes instead of practical purposes,
and today methods such as dry point etching and screen printing are more common
to the art student rather than the media press. Many of these techniques are
tricky and have many advantages and disadvantages to their methods.
In the past, printmaking was used in industry to produce
that which we would use machine for today, such as newspapers, books and other
important documents. From the 14th and 15th century
machines like the Printing press which used Letter press and was able to print
on paper in mass production for things like newspapers. However these presses
were worked by hand which would have restricted the production flow but at the
time this invention had a massive impact in print, so much so that it was named
as one of the three inventions that changed the world by English Philosopher
Francis Bacon in 1620. And today we wouldn’t have the printing technology that
we do without such an invention.
Intaglio is another older method of printing which was used around the
same time as the Printing press and was used to create the designs for playing
cards and artists made engravings of religious scenes with it; it was a very
sacred art. Around the time of Intaglio’s invention (14th-15th
century) printing methods were being invented and used left, right and centre
so many of the Intaglio techniques were invented around this time by different
people. These were methods such as stippling, which was various kinds of
shading through the use of dots and cross hatching which were groups of
parallel lines which were vertical to each other. A widely used technique
called drypoint was invented and used at this point, this was a version of
engraving which was used to give a softer look by using a needle which causes
the metal either side of the engraving to rise next to it. This causes better
engravings which hold more ink to produce a richer image however, the ridges
wear down quite quickly which means that this method was not suitable for mass
production. One of the most popular forms of Intaglio has to be Etching, a
development in the 16th century and a method which involves covering
a metal plate with a layer of acid resistant material and using an etching
needle to carve an image before dipping the plate in acid to reveal an image .
This method is feels similar to drawing with a pencil and this is why it is so
popular among many artists. Again this is more of an individual piece method
and not used for mass production.
Today, printing is much different to how it was many
centuries ago. For starters we have much more advanced technology which speed
up any printing process used in mass production and sometimes even individual
production. These days Letterpress or
the Printing Press machine are rarely used and the only way we see the Printing
press is in a museum about the medieval era whereas letterpress is only used by
graphic designers or artists who want to produce fine looking letters for an
art piece or a book cover. These days if we wanted to print newspapers and
magazines we would use Inkjet printing or Desktop printing. Inkjet printing is
a type of computer printing which recreates a digital image by propelling
droplets of ink onto paper, card or plastic; this printing is used widely in
industry because it can produce a mass amount in a short amount of time.
Desktop printing is a smaller computer printer which can produce typographic
quality text and generate layouts. This is used typically for magazines in the
media by editors before going into publishing. Since its invention Intaglio has
been used less for big media artistic images and magazine covers since the
invention of the Laser printer and has been reduced to the printing of things
such as banknotes and stamps. However Etching, especially dry point etching and
screen printing are still widely used around the globe for art, particularly
fine art because its engraving method is about the closest thing you’re going
to get to drawing on metal with a pencil, and you’re more likely to get the
image you want with your own hands than with a machine. In more recent years
the use of the laser has been used more frequently and for things it has never
been used for before such as, for etching. This is a contact free method of
etching which uses a laser machine to cut into the metal or plastic plate, it’s
a lot safer than the traditional hand method as you are not handling substances
such as acid. This is a method used more in industry than fine art because of
its minimal contact and fast paced movement. Another printing method which has come into
use in the more recent years has been 3D printing, which evolved from the
Inkjet laser printer so instead of printing with ink, it printed with
materials. In the first few years it was released it had only been used to make
prototypes and not to make real objects , this was because the objects made
were not up to the right standard at the time. A 3D printer takes a file on a
computer and creates a 3D objects out of it which are things today such as
phone cases, something that mostly everyone wants or needs. This is done by
layering up the material to form 3D objects. A 3D printer is expensive, it
could range from £175,000- £250,000 but it makes the process much quicker and
which is why most production companies have them. Digital screen printing is
the evolution of the type of printing techniques which were traditionally used
by hand such as screen printing. This method of printing isn’t just used in the
media industry; it’s used in all different areas for things like printing on
garments, curtains and banners. Before things like those listed above would
have all had to be done by hand and would have been fairly time consuming.
To get a better understanding on the art of printmaking and
its use today I interviewed a talented fine art student named Mary Wells. Mary
is currently doing her University foundation in fine art and one of the types
of art she has been studying has been printmaking, making her the perfect
interviewee. I’ve known Mary for a number of years and have always known her to
have a love for art and when I went to interview her I noticed that her room
was completely covered in her own artwork pieces that she has created over the
years, some dating back five or so years. On Sunday the 11th October
I sat down with her to ask her a few questions about Printmaking and she was
more than happy to answer. I sat down
with Mary and asked her what her favourite method of printmaking was, to which
she replied “My favourite would have to be dry point etching, which can be done
using a metal copper plate or a plastic plate” this answer lead onto the next
question I asked which was for her to give me a pro and con for the one she had
just mentioned, “Dry point
etching is the closest form of printmaking to drawing where you actually
scratch into a material, the con to it is that if you do it with metal you have
to use acid and you have to be quite careful because it can end up either
ruining your work or ruining your hands, it's quite a long winded process and
you never know how your print's gonna turn out but that can also be a pro
because it's quite a nice surprise pulling the paint back and seeing your print.”
Mary responded with a lot of description which was good for me because a lot of
people would only have responded with five words or less. I then asked her
about her artwork which she had shown me (picture below) of the shark which had
been done with dry point etching on a plastic plate, and I asked her why that
design? What inspired it?, to which she responded “At the beginning of the week
we were given (in college) some secondary sources to work with so we went to
brick lane, I used a shark because it linked to a hat that I bought from brick
lane so I created the shark with a sort of grungy look that I got from brick
lane. Um and there's loads of street art down there, on brick lane so I was
inspired by that and I really like sharks anyway so I decided to draw an illustration of a shark, and produce it in a grungy way that
sort of replicated brick lane street art.” The interview with Mary was very useful in giving me an idea of how
these printing methods I researched are used in fine art and whether they are
any good for certain pieces of art.
Printmaking
has evolved rapidly over the centuries; we went from the most basic method of
carving into wood and stone to using computerized equipment such as the laser
printer and Inkjet printing. Printmaking is used in everything from fine art to
business, to media and it’s always evolving.
Mary's Print work
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