How lithographs are made

https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/drawings-and-prints/materials-and-techniques/printmaking/lithograph

by alecst • 4 years ago

36 9 4 years ago

metmuseum.org

Animats• 4 years ago

How lithographs are really made.[1]

I once had a box made for a software product, back when software came in shrink wrapped boxes. The first box cost $4000. The second box cost $0.25. After I'd handed over the files to the artist who assembled the files for printing, and had approved the layouts on her screen, she said, "You want to see the press?" I said OK, and was given ear protection. We went into the press room, where a sheet-fed 7-color offset lithography press over 50 feet long was working. They were turning out fine art prints, faster than one per second. When the box business was slow, they shifted over to making art prints on thick stock.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vaoGoQfZ_4

nomel• 4 years ago

How would I know if I’m looking at something printed this way? Are there any easy to see “tells”?

quercusa• 4 years ago

Look closely at the image - you should see little tiny dots of color. On a newspaper they'll be fairly large and frequently the colors don't align ("aren't registered"), which is most visible in the corners of the image. This is because they are running very fast and it's "good enough".

Perfect registration is a given for fine art printers. Correct and consistent color is the hard part.

skupig• 4 years ago

If you like stone lithography, check out this beautiful project by illustrator Oldrich Jelen and printmaker Petr Korbelář: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQMd85fMGOk

supernova87a2• 4 years ago

And now with modern techniques the stone is etched with a tin plasma laser.

bhewes• 4 years ago

My favorite American Artist for Lithography work is John Muench - https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.5047.html https://www.invaluable.com/artist/muench-john-ythzz2i4fm/sol...

pcurve• 4 years ago

Ah... brings back so much memory. I majored in lithography. Larger stones were quite expensive back then ($2k).

There's something very calming about the lithography.

Most videos don't show all the tedious steps that go into lithography, including hand grinding of stone to remove previously etched image.

You can see it here. https://youtu.be/JHw5_1Hopsc?t=39

supernova87a2• 4 years ago

How many printings is the drawing of the pattern on the stone good for? That to me feels like a main limitation of this technique from achieving large volumes back in the day.

avidiax• 4 years ago

There's a comment on one of the above Youtube videos that "1 stone won't print 200". So it seems like the quality of the print may degrade quickly.

How lithographs are made

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