Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Greensfelder
I have to disagree with you a little, Diderick. There were many different printing techniques used during the 19thc. The example you gave from Pellerin, in fact, colored their prints using stencils and watercolors. Watercolor pigments were of quite good quality at that time and hold up well. Both the colors of the older paper models and the paper itself suffered a lot from exposure to light and other abuses.
The other factor to consider is aesthetics. My impression is that the IFJ designers preferred a more subtle color palette and avoided harsh combinations of primary colors.
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Hello Tom,
You are of course right about the different printing techniques. I visited the Pellerin museum a few years ago, where they have a working 'stencil type machine'. That was used for their cheapest products, which can always be recognised because of the often slightly overlapping colours, and bits of colour outside the edges of drawings. They were generally sold as 'penny prints'.
Pellerin also made colour pictures of much higher quality, with very exact fitting of colours: a number of of stones were prepared to print various colours. Of course they had to be adjusted very carefully, exactly the way more modern colourprinting was done in offset machines. Definitely a very expensive process.
I have a visit to a museum of lithography on my bucket list - there is one here in The Netherlands, which is apparently quite famous. Corona allowing, i may try next week! Will report here.
In the meantime, I found a picture to illustrate this highly sophisticated technique. It shows the five (!) stones needed to print the poster...