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How was that Printed? (Analyzing a Fine Art Print)

My fiancee and I found a signed print today at one of our favorite thrift stores for $20. The proprietor of this store is quite knowledgeable about fine art prints and has software that allows her to scan the signature and then locate the artist and samples of the artist’s work online. It’s really quite amazing. She also found an image of the exact print we had before us as well as the signature and artist’s bio.

Although my fiancee has not yet decided whether to buy the piece (the $20 price included the frame, by the way), she, the proprietor of the thrift store, and I had a good time discussing exactly how the three of us thought the print had been produced and noting what clues had led us to that judgment.

And as print buyers and graphic designers, you may find this to be an interesting exercise when you find a sample art piece in a thrift store or estate sale.

First, using the thrift-store proprietor’s lighted printer’s loupe (it’s really more of an antique store, given its contents), we saw that there were no halftone dots.

The means the image was not reproduced via offset lithography, like a poster. The image had not been broken down into rows of larger or smaller printer dots to simulate lighter or darker tones, as is the case with everything from commercial newspaper printing to commercial book and brochure printing. Since printer’s ink on an offset press is either printed black (or any of the other process colors or PMS colors) or not printed at all (i.e., there are no shades of color or gray between full saturation and no ink), halftoning images is the way a printer presents lighter or darker areas.

Since there were no halftone dots and the image was therefore not printed via offset lithography, this art print was not from a large run (like 1,000 or more copies). There was a limited supply of this particular fine art print.

In addition, the work had been signed. Under a loupe the signature had the telltale reflective gray of graphite (i.e., it had been signed with a pencil). It also was not composed of halftone dots (I checked just to make sure). So it was clearly an original signature.

Unfortunately, the art print was not numbered. Usually you’ll see a fraction, like 20/500. This means print number 20 of an entire run of 500. Scarcity is one quality of many that makes a print valuable. Other qualities might include the reputation of the artist.

(This is why my fiancee and I covet the store proprietor’s scanning software, which allows her to scan and research a work by its signature, even if she can’t actually make out the letters of the signature. It also allows her to quickly gather all kinds of information on the artist.)

Then we noticed that the entirety of the picture within the matted, framed print was embossed (as a rectangle). This suggested the piece had been printed on a hand-operated art printing press. The "plate mark" embossing is a dead giveaway. Think of it this way. A metal plate in a hand operated art-printing press creates an indented mark on the paper due to the intense pressure of the printing press roller.

So at this point we knew it was a handmade art print. Furthermore, we could see that there were various tones (light to dark) and the black within the print was a velvety gray (again with no halftones).

My fiancee, an art therapist, thought this was an etching, based on her experience. In fact, she thought it was a hand-colored etching.

Let’s break this down. To produce a copper, iron, or zinc plate for such an etching, one starts by painting a resist resin (with a tar-like consistency) all over the plate. This is called an etching ground, and it is usually composed of beeswax, bitumen, or resin.

Then the artist uses a sharp tool to cut lines through the etching ground to the metal below the resist coating.

Then the plate is put in an acid bath. The acid burns into the plate where the lines have been scratched through the etching ground but does not touch anything below the "resist" tar-like etching ground. By cutting into the resist and then burning the plate in an acid bath repeatedly, the artist can create different levels of depth and width for the incised lines in the plate, which will print as different tones (lighter or darker black ink). Lines cut more deeply (and/or wider) into the metal will hold more ink and therefore will print darker.

Once the acid "biting" of the plate is complete and any remaining etching ground has been removed with a solvent, the plate can be inked. Thick, oily ink is wiped over the surface of the plate, and this gets into the incised marks made by the artist. When she or he wipes off the surface, ink remains in the recessed areas of the plate that were cut by the acid bath. Any areas that are still flat (i.e., the uncut plate surface) will receive no ink (because it will have been wiped off the plate surface by the artist).

The artist can then put the plate on the flat bed of the hand-operated printing press, and cover it with a sheet of damp printing paper and then a felt blanket. After this step, the plate and paper can be run through the press. Pressure from the heavy roller cylinder will force the damp printing paper into the inked recesses of the printing plate, and the ink will be transferred to the paper.

So, now let’s get back to the sample we found at the thrift store.

The print, which was an image of a woman lounging on a bed, had an underlying structure of black ink. Very velvety, full-black ink. But it also had areas of color, many of which were fluid, transitioning into one another.

Now it is possible to do a multi-colored etching. You would just need to create a plate for each ink color, and you would need to print them in register, one pass through the hand-operated press for each color, after changing the plate each time. In my experience this would more than likely lead to a lot of areas of flat, unmodulated color rather than the gradations of color and the transitioning from one color to another that I saw in the artwork.

An alternative to this method would involve coloring by hand each black print "pulled" from the etched printing plate.

So my fiancee and I used the loupe again. One of the things I saw was a slight overprinting of the color onto the areas of black ink. I also saw that the dried color substance seemed to be powdery, and that it seemed to sit up on the hills of the printing paper (the raised areas) and not seep into the valleys (the recessed areas of the textured press sheet).

To me it looked like a dry medium such as colored pencil had been used to draw on the heavy-toothed (textured) paper. It was my belief (an educated guess) that a water-based medium, like watercolor or gouache, would not have stayed on only the raised parts (or peaks) of the textured paper but would have seeped into the valleys. That said, according to my research, watercolor is the traditional medium for hand-coloring an etching. Perhaps watercolor pencils, which can be applied like graphite and then wet down to become more fluid, were used.

Just a thoughtful guess.

So my fiancee’s, the thrift store proprietor’s, and my combined educated guess was that this was a hand-colored, signed but not numbered, etching.

Now how, you may be asking, does this relate to you?

First of all, it helps to understand a lot of different printing processes so you can determine the best one for your specific commercial printing job and then approach the right kind of commercial printing establishment for the work (offset printer, flexographic printer, screen printer, digital printer, etc.).

In this case the process is called "intaglio." The ink is forced into the recessed areas of the printing plate and then transferred to the printing paper.

In most cases you will be buying offset lithographic work, which is "planographic." Greasy ink and water repel one another, so the image area and non-image area of a printing plate can be on the same flat surface (i.e., planographic) in contrast to the recessed image areas (and flat non-image areas) of the intaglio plate.

The third option, which is used in letterpress printing, is "relief" printing. In this case the image areas are raised. You ink them up on a printing plate, and then press the printing plate and the paper together, and the image transfers from the former to the latter.

(An example of this might be a plate made by cutting away sections of a linoleum block or wood block, leaving the image areas sticking up above the non-image areas.)

In all of these cases you can make numerous art prints at a good pace when compared to producing each one by hand.

So as you can see, art prints done by hand on a fine-art printing press are really not that different from commercially printed pieces. They are just produced as a much shorter run on a much smaller press.

[Steven Waxman is a printing consultant. He teaches corporations how to save money buying printing, brokers printing services, and teaches prepress techniques. Steven has been in the printing industry for thirty-three years working as a writer, editor, print buyer, photographer, graphic designer, art director, and production manager.]