How to Identify Prints:

How to Identify Prints

Before digital and photographic technology, images were transferred to paper from stone, metal, and wood. part ofan honest education in humanistic discipline involves finding out and distinctive these totally different printing processes. whereasartistic creationmay be a field you’ll be able to study forever, you’ll be able to learn the fundamentals of distinctive relief, intaglio, and printing lithography to begin building your identification skills.

Identifying Relief Prints :

Understand the process of relief printing.

Relief printing is the oldest and most traditional printing technology, and involves reproducing images at its most basic. In relief printing, a wood or metal relief block is carved by cutting away the areas of the picture that will not be printed, then ink is applied to the raised areas either by dabbing the areas to be printed, or rolling the ink on. The final stage of the process involves transferring the ink to the page by laying a sheet of paper and applying pressure. Examples of relief prints include:

• Wood block printing
• Linocut
• Type-set

Examine the rim of the print :

One of the quickest and most reliable ways of identifying relief prints is to examine the edges of the print for evidence. The process by which ink is transferred from the block via pressure will produce a characteristic rim around the edges of life. This is a feature that is only characterized by relief printing processes, so it’s always a sure sign.

• For comparison purposes, examine the serial number on any bill of US currency. You should notice the rim of the numbers is slightly darker than the inside. This is a sign of relief printing. Look for this tendency in the piece that you’re examining

Look for signs of embossing :

• Compared with intaglio printing, the pressure required to make relief prints is relatively minor, meaning that embossing will sometimes be difficult to see and differentiate from that of intaglio printing, which is more severe.
• Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) is often used to highlight and document the physical signifiers of embossing in relief printing.

Look for signs :

Look for signs of cutting in the cross-hatching or shaded areas.

While it might seem obvious, one of the best ways of distinguishing relief from intaglio printing is in examining the black marks as closely as possible and trying to decide whether it looks like they were raised, or the white marks were raised on the original block. This is part intuition and part experience, but one of the best places to look is in shaded or cross-hatched areas.

• On relief prints, you should be able to see that shading is made by cutting out little wedges between short lines, then cutting a long line at right-angles, leaving smooth outside lines.