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Old 04-08-2021, 02:30 AM
Diderick A. den Bakker's Avatar
Diderick A. den Bakker Diderick A. den Bakker is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Zeist (near Utrecht), Holland
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Just a bit about the technical side of lithography.
First stage: making the original picture. This could be anything, in b/w or full colour. In many cases, the artist would probably be given instructions by the printer / publisher (in this case Epinal) about size, amount of detail, number of colors.
Second stage: the lithographer then had to translate the original onto the printing stone. Remember: everything had to be in reverse, of course! The first stone would be the b/w basis, looking a bit like an engraving.
So far, so good. The next stage is the really difficult one: a new stone had to be made for every separate colour. Just try to imagine how difficult it was to fit the coloured areas - without having the black lines available. Not exactly painting by numbers... Lighter or darker shades in one colour could be suggested by the 'density' of the underlying b/w print. Looking closely at the 'Zeppelins over Paris' I think there are just two colours. In a lith. museum I saw prints and stones of luxury cigar box illustrations, which took up to twelve stones. Same for the lovely, colorful vintage Xmas cards we all know.
Last stage: the actual printing, when various stones had to be registered with extreme care.
There was also a very much cheaper technique for adding colour: a number of stencils were cut by jigsaw from a thin sheet of copper, again one for every colour. Colours often do not exactly fit the lines - often seen on the cheapest of prints, and on sheets with soldiers. etc.
Google says the only museum of lithography in the world is the one in my country. Of course I already had a vague knowledge of this craft, but a visit to the museum brought home to me exactly how high the level of artisanship used to be. A special trip to our country is perhaps a bit much, but there are bound to be books for those who want to know more about this dying technique!
The picture shows the stencil machine for mass production, regularly demonstrated in the Epinal Museum.
Attached Thumbnails
Zeppelins Over Paris-pochmec5.jpg  
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