It’s the holiday season, a time to celebrate those you love and potentially give them tangible gifts. Obviously I’m biased, but I believe giving an original art piece is a great way to brighten someone’s day. As an artist, I know a lot of love goes into the making of my work, and somehow the idea of that love getting passed along makes it all the better. *A great book on this subject is The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde.
A couple of years back, I worked for Silicon Fine Art Printing where we would make prints for artists all the time. Coupling that with my experience in other printmaking techniques like woodcut, lithography, intaglio, and silkscreen, I am familiar with the specifics of the printmaking world, so it was only natural that I’d offer prints of my work. I myself have purchased prints from artists when prices of originals are just a little above what I can afford.
So with that in mind, I thought it could be helpful to share some information when it comes to purchasing prints from artists.
Editions: This refers to the total number of identical prints created. Editions can be limited and range in number from 5-100 or they can be open, or unlimited. Each print in an edition is signed and numbered by the artist and is the guarantee that only a certain number will exist, ever (if the edition is limited). This explains why editions that are smaller are often more expensive as there will be fewer that exist in the world. Also good to note here that different sized prints of the same imagery will be considered separate editions.
There is also the Artist’s Proof, or AP which is the first print that’s “fit to pull” and serves as the point of reference for which all other prints have to match to be included in the edition.
Processes: There are many methods of printmaking. Woodcut, or relief, is when wood, or sometimes linoleum, is carved into, creating depressions so that when you roll ink onto the surface, where you’ve removed material remains “uninked” and therefore doesn’t transfer when you press paper onto the surface. Intaglio is a process, usually on zinc or copper plates, where similarly, you are carving with tools to scratch the surface or using a variety of acid washes to etch the surface of the plate. Lithography I always thought was the most magical of the processes. Now they have plates, but when I learned we used limestone blocks which we had to sand down by hand after each print and use a special cart to lift and move around. Using grease crayons and tusche washes you made your drawing on the stone. Once complete, you etched the surface using acid suspended in gum arabic. Different strengths were used depending on the tonality of the drawing. Once that process was complete, you washed away your drawing!!!!! Then, when you inked the stone up, your drawing would magically reappear. Ok, it’s not actually magic, but it definitely was exciting. Silkscreen was the method I was exposed to most recently where you can use a combination of stencils and photo sensitive screens to expose drawings or photographs.
So there you have it, a very brief intro to printmaking. Here’s to a wonderful holiday season. Peace and Love :)