Every fine print is an original impression, not a copy
Printmaking transfers ink from a matrix—wood, metal, stone, or screen—to paper or cloth, usually yielding multiples. Each pull is an "impression," an original artwork; a "copy" means a different print imitating another. Since the late nineteenth century artists often sign and number limited editions, then destroy the matrix.
Traditional printmaking is hand-processed, though risograph and digital methods blur lines. Matrices include metal for engraving and etching, stone or polymer for lithography, wood or linoleum for relief cuts, and fabric screens for stencil processes. Categories split into relief (ink on the raised surface: woodcut, linocut), intaglio (ink forced into grooves: engraving, etching, mezzotint, aquatint), planographic (prepared flat surface: lithography, monotype), and stencil (screen printing, pochoir). Rembrandt "etchings" often mix engraving and drypoint. Woodcut is the earliest technique—probably first for cloth patterns, then by the fifth century in China for text and images on paper; European image woodcuts appear around 1400, Japanese soon after. Reduction printing carves one block in stages so colors register perfectly, at the cost of never reprinting earlier states.
Engraving grew in 1430s Germany from goldsmith decoration: a burin cuts copper, ink fills lines, and a press transfers them; hundreds of impressions can precede wear, fewer with shallow drypoint. Stanley William Hayter's twentieth-century Atelier 17 drew Picasso, Giacometti, Lasansky, and Miró back to true engraving. Etching covers a plate with ground, draws through it, and lets acid bite exposed metal—easier for trained draftsmen than burin work. Daniel Hopfer of Augsburg (c. 1470–1536) likely invented the armor-to-print method; Albrecht Dürer's 1515 plate is the first dated etching. Mezzotint, invented by Ludwig von Siegen (1609–1680), roughens a plate with a rocker then burnishes lights from dark; England used it widely from the mid-eighteenth century for portrait reproductions. Aquatint's rosin dust yields tonal washes but wears fast—perhaps only about 100 strong impressions—which, with nineteenth-century popularity, encouraged limited editions; Goya relied on it, and later reprintings lost much grain.
Abraham Bosse's 1642 etching The Etcher's Press documents the workshop craft itself. Drypoint's soft burr may allow only ten or twenty impressions before steelfacing hardens the plate. Multiples, paradoxically, made scarcity a modern artistic choice.
Source: Printmaking
