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Mezzotint is known for the luxurious quality of its tones: first, because an evenly, finely roughened surface holds a lot of ink, allowing deep solid colours to be printed; secondly because the process of smoothing the plate with burin, burnisher and scraper allows fine gradations in tone to be developed. The scraper is a triangular ended tool ...
Before the invention of tonal intaglio techniques such as mezzotint and aquatint surface tone was really the only way to add tonal effects, but the technique sometimes continued to be used with the new tonal techniques, especially in the etching revival than began around 1850, the "most visible characteristic of [which]... was an obsession with ...
Saint Agnes, mezzotint by John Smith after Godfrey Kneller. [1] 1835 aquatint showing the first production of I puritani. Coquetry, lithograph by Henri Baron (1816-1885). Monochrome printmaking is a generic term for any printmaking technique that produces only shades of a single color. While the term may include ordinary printing with only two ...
Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching that produces areas of tone rather than lines. For this reason it has mostly been used in conjunction with etching, to give both lines and shaded tone. [ 1 ]
Like etching, aquatint technique involves the application of acid to make marks in a metal plate. Where the etching technique uses a needle to make lines that retain ink, traditional aquatint relies on powdered rosin which is acid resistant in the ground to create a tonal effect. The rosin is applied in a light dusting by a fan booth, the rosin ...
The main techniques used, in order of their introduction, are woodcut, engraving, etching, mezzotint and aquatint, although there are others. Different techniques are often combined in a single print. With rare exceptions printed on textiles, such as silk, or on vellum, old master prints are printed on paper.
Portrait of Amelie Elisabeth von Hessen, the first known mezzotint, by Ludwig von Siegen, 1642. Ludwig von Siegen (c. March 1609 Cologne – c. 1680 Wolfenbüttel, Germany) was a German soldier and amateur engraver, who invented the printmaking technique of mezzotint, a printing-process reliant on mechanical pressure used to print more complex engravings than previously possible.
Stipple competed with mezzotint as a tonal method of printmaking, and while it lacked the rich depth of tone of mezzotint, it had the great advantage that far more impressions could be taken from a plate. [8] During the late eighteenth century, some printmakers, including Francesco Bartolozzi, began to use colour in stipple engraving.