Technique Made Easy

Think of intaglio as an umbrella word that covers many printmaking techniques that create incised or sunken designs on plates, usually made of copper. Intaglio is a fluid process, where many techniques develop the image on the same plate, each one contributing a different texture or depth. These include etching (using acid to form the marks on a plate) or dry point or engraving (which use etching needles, a burin, or other tools to incise the mark on the plate).

Working on intaglio on copper plates is quite beautiful. The plate starts as a warm, dark burnt-orange color. As you take the plate through different processes or acid baths, each layer on the plate develops a different patina, forming many subtle colors. The original dark copper softens toward grayer oranges, while other areas throw off a light-purple cast. As the plate color changes, the plate itself becomes sculptural -- a mini-bas-relief, each layer taking and holding the ink with which it is printed differently.

After the technique is applied to the plate, you make a print to see what has actually happened. This is done by inking the plates and running them through a press with paper. This process is called "pulling" a print, as you pull the paper off the plate. The image, when printed, is reversed from what you are looking at on the plate. That is the first of the "surprises" that characterize printmaking, though the better you know the technique, the more you can control. Other surprises may be how a texture evolves, how a line or an area of tone holds the ink, or -- one of Brimberry's favorites -- how the color actually turns out when you overlap one color over another. You repeat the process of working a plate and printing it until the image is fully developed. Then you pull an edition -- a limited number of prints.

Once an edition is pulled, no more are printed, and the plate is often destroyed. Editions are numbered, for example, 1/10 or 4/25. The latter number denotes how many prints are in the edition; the first number denotes what number in the edition that print is.

Although printmaking sounds largely technical when you describe it -- something that scares away many artists -- it really isn't. It is like any other skill of process: The better you know it, the more the artmaking takes over. That is why many of the best printmakers are artists in other disciplines; they bring the freedom of their thinking in another medium with them, while many printmakers chase technical effects because they have so much skill.