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As a teenager I got the opportunity to work on copper plates and I made my first prints during a few summer weeks. Today I wouldn't consider them particularly good, not even in comparison to my drawings and paintings from the same period. Somewhat later, in 1992, I did another drypoint but still the technique didn't appeal to me so I left it aside. About seven years ago I took up printmaking in earnest, starting with linoleum and later returning to intaglio. My previous experience probably should have proven useful, except that I didn't really remember very much of it. The smell of the ink, certainly, but not the craft.
Now, after having followed several courses in various techniques and worked with printmaking on my own, I find that the simplest approaches are often the most efficient ones. Colour prints are always complicated. Colour techniques usually require multiple plates and a careful registration, which is always a hassle. You have to know about the varying degrees of transparency of different colours, and what paper to use. In woodcuts you have to decide whether to let the paint dry or not between the application of each plate, what thickness and consistency of ink to use, and how much pressure to apply. Unlike oil, acrylic, or gouache painting, mistakes usually can't be corrected.
Intaglio prints can be made rather spontaneously, depending on the technique of course. As with drawing, the markings in the plate become the printing parts. The advantages of etching are the ease of transfer; you don't have to be as heavy-handed as with drypoint, and also the engraving becomes more durable so that larger editions can be made. (Actually, I don't think large editions is such a great advantage, given that they just end up taking up space in a drawer.) Maybe I've been unlucky with the etching ground I'm using, in any case I rarely succeed in getting it right at the first attempt, so I may need to add detail and etch the same plate as much as three or four times. Doing so is even harder, because the plate needs to be fully covered in opaque etching ground, so you can't see which parts of the plate need reinforcement.
Aquatint of all varieties can produce beatiful colour prints, but the complicated technique, including the use of hazardous resins doesn't appeal to me. Instead, I have prefered experimenting with line etchings and drypoint. In a recent colour print I used two zinc plates and a plexiglass slightly bigger than the two zinc plates together. For the zinc plates I chose green and a reddish orange, and for the covering plexiglass a violet in the lower part and umber mixed with black in the higer part. Unfortunately, zinc seems to have some chemical reaction with pigments in the yellow to red range that I wasn't aware about. No matter how much I tried to ensure the plate was clean, the saturated orange red would turn beige on the plate.
Colour drypoint, 2022, using zinc plates (643 kB)
Colour prints made with drypoint seems to be a little explored technique. It's almost impossible to achieve the smooth blending of colour surfaces of an aquatint etching since the method is line-based. But using plexiglass plates, the alignment of each plate of a different colour becomes rather easy. Until running them through the printing press, of course, which is where misalignments typically happen. Zinc plates are softer and easier to work, with the added benefit that only relatively small editions can be made before the plates wear out. Also, copper has become so much more expensive lately, and it wasn't cheap before. (Will you please stop putting all that copper into silly electronic gadgets? Artists need it!) Zinc plates are still significantly cheaper than copper, and also softer, but they tend to leave a darker plate tone and offer less contrast.
Three colour drypoint, 2021 (597 kB)
Another way of working in colour is to apply several different colours selectively to the same plate. The result may become less distinct as colours tend to blend as the plate is wiped, and it's hard to make a full edition of prints with identical appearance. On the other hand, why should each copy in a hand-printed edition look indistinguishably similar? This attitude seems to prevail since art schools found prestige in educating artists to be as perfect as a machine. Now that actual machine prints such as giclées from the artist's digital files are accepted as original art, at least by some, it may be appropriate to revise the standards of handprints.
The charm of small edition handmade prints is that everyone can afford to have one. Well, that's obviously not true, but the claim has been made. Prints are collectible, and certainly more affordable than paintings. Most print makers I know keep to quite moderate pricing, given the actual cost of the materials used and the time required to make a single print. If you're an artist and your collector starts complaining about having filled up all the walls with pictures, tell them they need a drawer to collect prints in. A print expected to last long should have a decent frame and maybe even UV-blocking glass to preserve colours, but hanging them with a clamp or two can be fine.
Instead of a hundred likes on some asocial medium, a print may exist in five or a dozen copies. Believe it or not, some prints don't even end up on the internet. It's always an honour to be represented with a print in someone else's home.
