Printmaking: relief, intaglio and screen printing

In short

Printmaking is the making of an artwork by transferring ink from a prepared matrix (block, plate, stone or screen) onto paper, so that the artist can pull a controlled number of original impressions called an edition. The three families examined in a BFA/BVA studio-practice paper are relief (ink sits on the raised surface), intaglio (ink sits in incised recesses below the surface) and planographic/stencil processes, of which screen printing (serigraphy) is the stencil method and lithography the planographic one. It matters because each family has its own tools, acids, papers, pressures and safety rules, and examiners test the process steps and their logic, not just the images. It is examined in university practical and viva papers, in NTA/CUET-PG and university MFA entrance tests, and in interviews at print studios, publishing houses, textile and packaging units, and design studios. Printmaking skills also feed directly into Indian jobs in screen-printing units, art-print editions, graphic design and museum/gallery print-conservation work.

Explained

Definitions, the matrix, and what makes a print "original"

• Matrix: the worked surface that carries the image — wood block, lino, metal plate, litho stone, screen mesh. Every impression comes from it.
• Impression: one sheet pulled from the matrix. Edition: the agreed total number of good impressions; after printing, the plate is often cancelled (scored) so no more can be pulled.
• Original print: conceived by the artist as a print and pulled from a matrix the artist made or authorised — as opposed to a reproduction (a photomechanical copy of a painting), which is not a print in the fine-art sense.
• Edition numbering: written in pencil in the bottom margin — 7/50 means the 7th sheet of an edition of 50. The number sits at the left, the title in the centre, and the signature and year at the right.
• Proofs: trial/state proof (pulled while developing the image), BAT / bon à tirer (the approved standard the edition must match), AP (artist's proof), PP (printer's proof), HC (hors commerce). APs are conventionally up to about 10% of the edition.
• Four families: relief, intaglio, planographic (lithography, offset), stencil (screen/serigraphy, pochoir). Monotype/monoprint sit apart — a monotype is a one-off painted plate with no repeatable matrix.
• Mirror rule: relief, intaglio and lithography reverse the image left-to-right. Text and signatures cut into a block or plate must be cut in reverse; screen printing, which pushes ink through a stencil, does not reverse.

Relief printing

• Principle: the areas to be *white* are cut away; ink is rolled onto the remaining raised surface; low pressure transfers it.
• Types:
  • Woodcut — plank/side grain (softer woods: pine, mango, plywood; hard shisham offcuts for finer work); knives and gouges; bold, grainy, direct.
  • Wood engraving — end grain of hard wood (boxwood, lemonwood) worked with burins; very fine white lines on black.
  • Linocut — battleship grey lino; no grain, cuts equally in all directions; warming the lino softens it.
  • Metal relief, cardboard relief (collagraph-relief), rubber/vinyl block, found-object relief.
  • Reduction (suicide) print — one block, printed lightest colour first, then cut further for each darker colour; the block cannot be returned to an earlier state, hence the name.
  • Multi-block colour — one block per colour, each registered to the same sheet.
  • Japanese water-based (moku hanga) — rice-paste and water pigments, printed with a baren on damp washi.
• Tools: U- and V-gouges, chisels, knives, bench hook, brayer (hand roller), ink slab, baren or burnisher, press.
• Steps: 1. draw and transfer the design in reverse; 2. seal/ink the surface so cut areas read clearly; 3. cut away whites, cutting *away* from the hand; 4. roll out ink to an even tacky film and charge the roller; 5. ink the block in crossing directions; 6. lay registered paper; 7. print by baren, spoon, platen or cylinder press; 8. peel back and check; 9. edition, then dry under weight.
• Advantages: cheapest set-up, no acid, large sizes possible, printable by hand without a press, bold graphic strength.
• Limitations: no continuous tone except by cutting marks or cross-hatching; fine detail is fragile and wears; wood grain can swell with water-based ink.

Intaglio printing

• Principle (Italian *intagliare*, to incise): the image is cut, scratched or etched *into* a metal plate; ink is forced into the lines, the polished surface is wiped clean, and a damp sheet under heavy press pressure lifts ink out of the recesses — so an intaglio print has a slight relief of ink you can feel and a plate mark (embossed border).
• Plates: copper (classic, takes fine line, bites evenly), zinc (cheaper, bites faster and coarser), mild steel and aluminium (economical, used widely in Indian college studios), acrylic/perspex for drypoint.
• Direct (non-acid) methods:
  • Drypoint — scratched with a steel or diamond point; the raised burr holds extra ink and gives a velvety line, but crushes after 20–40 impressions unless steel-faced.
  • Engraving (line engraving) — a burin ploughs a clean V-groove; crisp, swelling lines; very durable.
  • Mezzotint — the plate is roughened all over with a rocker to print solid black, then scraped and burnished back to light; works from dark to light, giving the richest continuous tone.
• Indirect (acid/etched) methods:
  • Hard-ground etching — plate degreased, coated with acid-resistant ground, drawn through with a needle, bitten in acid; biting time controls line depth and hence darkness.
  • Soft-ground etching — tallow-softened ground takes impressions of pencil texture, fabric or leaves.
  • Aquatint — powdered rosin dusted on and heated to fuse into dots; acid bites between the dots, giving flat tonal areas. Tone is built by stop-out varnish and stepped bites — shortest bite for the lightest tone.
  • Sugar-lift (lift-ground) — sugar-syrup ink painted on, varnished over, soaked so the sugar swells and lifts, exposing painted shapes for aquatinting.
  • Spit bite — acid brushed on directly over aquatint for washy, painterly tone.
  • Photo-etching / photopolymer — light-hardened film resist exposed through a positive; non-acid photopolymer plates are the safer modern route.
  • Viscosity printing — Krishna Reddy's method at Atelier 17: a single deeply worked plate inked with inks of different viscosity and rollers of different hardness, so thin and thick inks reject each other and print several colours in one pass.
• Mordants: ferric chloride (safer, for copper), nitric acid (zinc/copper, gassy and exothermic), Dutch mordant, and the "Edinburgh etch" (ferric chloride with citric acid). Copper sulphate + salt (the saline sulphate or Bordeaux etch) on zinc and aluminium is the usual low-toxicity studio choice in India.
• Printing steps: 1. file and bevel the plate edges (unbevelled edges cut the blanket and the paper); 2. warm the plate on a hotplate; 3. dab stiff etching ink into all recesses with a dabber/card; 4. wipe with tarlatan in circling strokes, then hand-wipe with the heel of the palm; 5. clean the margins with whiting; 6. place on the press bed, lay damp paper, then blotting and felt blankets; 7. roll through an etching press at firm pressure; 8. lift, inspect, and dry the sheet flat between blotters under weight.
• Paper: 100% cotton rag, 250–300 gsm, soaked 10–30 minutes and surface-blotted to the "damp but not wet" state; damp fibre is plastic enough to be pushed into the lines.
• Advantages: finest line of all processes, true continuous tone (mezzotint/aquatint), rich blacks, tactile ink relief, long editions from engraved copper.
• Limitations: needs a press, acids and ventilation; slowest to wipe and print; drypoint burr and zinc plates wear quickly; plate size limited by the press bed.

Screen printing (serigraphy)

• Principle: a stencil blocks part of a tensioned mesh; ink is pushed through the open mesh onto the substrate with a squeegee. It is the only one of the three that prints the right way round and onto almost any material.
• Frame and mesh: aluminium or seasoned wood frame; polyester monofilament mesh (silk is historical). Mesh count in threads/cm (or per inch) decides ink deposit — about 43T/110 for textile plastisol and heavy coverage, 90–120T (230–305) for fine halftone and paper work. Higher count = finer detail, thinner ink film.
• Stencil types:
  1. Paper/hand-cut stencil — simplest, for flat shapes.
  2. Knife-cut film (lacquer/water-adhered) — sharp edges.
  3. Block-out/resist drawing — screen filler painted directly, or glue-and-tusche washout.
  4. Photo-emulsion (direct) — the standard: coat, dry, expose, wash out.
  5. Capillary/indirect film, and photopolymer one-pot emulsions.
• Photo-emulsion steps: 1. degrease and abrade the mesh; 2. coat both sides with sensitised diazo or SBQ emulsion in a dark room using a scoop coater; 3. dry flat in the dark; 4. make a film positive (opaque where ink must print); 5. expose to UV/metal-halide through the positive in contact under glass or vacuum; 6. wash out the unexposed (unhardened) emulsion with a water jet — the open areas become the image; 7. dry, check for pinholes, block them with filler, tape the margins.
• Printing steps: set the screen in hinges or a carousel with off-contact of 1–3 mm; register the sheet on guides/lays; flood-coat the ink; pull the squeegee at about 60–75°, one firm even stroke; lift, remove the print, rack to dry; repeat. Print one colour, dry, then the next in register, lightest/largest areas usually first. Reclaim the screen with emulsion remover and a ghost/haze remover.
• Squeegee: polyurethane blade, 60–80 shore A hardness; sharp square edge for fine detail, rounded for heavy deposit. Angle, speed, pressure and off-contact are the four variables that control deposit.
• Inks: water-based acrylic and pigment-binder systems (paper, low odour), solvent/enamel (plastic, metal, glass), plastisol (PVC-based, textiles, cured about 150–160 °C), UV-curable, discharge and puff inks for fabric.
• Halftone and separations: continuous tone is converted into dots; keep the halftone line count roughly a fifth to a quarter of the mesh count, and set screen angles to avoid moiré. Four-colour process (CMYK) and spot-colour separation are both used.
• Advantages: thickest, most opaque ink film of any process; prints on paper, cloth, wood, metal, glass, plastic, ceramic, curved bottles; very large sizes; cheap per impression in long runs; flat intense colour.
• Limitations: one screen per colour; fine hairlines and very fine tone are limited by mesh; needs drying space and solvents; registration drift over long runs; not suited to tiny runs of many colours.
• Common faults: pinholes (dust on the positive), sawtooth edges (mesh too coarse, under-exposure), ink drying in the mesh, ghost images from poor reclaiming, blurred edges from too much off-contact or soft squeegee.

Registration, paper, editioning and studio practice

• Registration methods: T-bar or kento marks (relief), pin/needle registration, acetate/mylar overlay method, three-point lays or a registration board with stops.
• Paper: acid-free, pH-neutral, 100% cotton rag for editions; gsm (grammage) and deckle matter; machine-made cartridge for proofing. Indian handmade sheets from Sanganer and Pondicherry are widely used; mould-made Western sheets (Fabriano, Arches, Hahnemühle) for intaglio. Watermark reading and grain direction should be consistent through an edition.
• Ink: relief and intaglio use stiff oil-based inks modified with plate oil, magnesium carbonate (stiffener) or easy-wipe compound; chine collé bonds a thin coloured tissue to the sheet during printing.
• Drying and finishing: intaglio and relief sheets dried flat between blotters under weight to stop cockling; screen prints racked or air-dried; deckle-edge margins kept clean; print curation — signing, numbering, interleaving with glassine, flat storage in a solander box.
• Safety and law: acids and solvents stored and labelled; local exhaust ventilation over acid trays and screen-washing; aprons, nitrile gloves, goggles; acid added to water, never the reverse; spent ferric chloride and emulsion remover are chemical waste, not drain waste. Occupational safety in Indian workplaces is now governed by the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 (in force 21 November 2025), which replaced the Factories Act; hazardous-waste disposal follows the Hazardous and Other Wastes (Management and Transboundary Movement) Rules, 2016 as amended, with the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2026 (from 1 April 2026) covering general studio waste. Copyright in a print is governed by the Copyright Act, 1957 (as amended) — an artistic work, with the artist's economic rights generally lasting the artist's life plus 60 years, and moral rights (paternity and integrity) protected separately.
• Market practice in India: editions documented with a certificate of authenticity; GST on artworks and printing services falls in the 5%/18% structure in force since 22 September 2025 — the rate depends on whether it is an original artwork or a job-work printing service, so confirm the classification for a given case rather than assuming one rate.

Comparison, history and the Indian lineage

• Pressure needed: screen (hand squeegee, no press) < relief (light platen or hand) < intaglio (heavy roller press).
• Ink film thickness: screen (thickest) > intaglio > relief > lithography (thinnest).
• Historical line: Chinese woodblock (Diamond Sutra, 868 CE); European woodcut and engraving from the 15th century (Dürer); etching matured with Rembrandt; mezzotint from the mid-17th century and aquatint from the mid-18th; lithography invented by Senefelder (1798); screen printing industrialised in the early 20th century, named *serigraphy* to mark its fine-art use, and made famous by Warhol.
• India: Bengal woodcut and the Battala popular prints of 19th-century Calcutta; Kalighat paintings and their lithographed versions; Raja Ravi Varma's oleograph press at Ghatkopar/Lonavala spread chromolithographs; Nandalal Bose and the Santiniketan woodcut tradition; Somnath Hore's *Wounds* series using pulp prints and intaglio; Krishna Reddy, co-developer of viscosity printing; Haren Das (woodcut/wood engraving), Laxma Goud, Jyoti Bhatt, Anupam Sud, Zarina Hashmi, K. G. Subramanyan. Key centres: Kala Bhavana Santiniketan, Faculty of Fine Arts MSU Baroda, Government College of Art & Craft Kolkata, Sir J. J. School of Art Mumbai, Delhi College of Art, and the Garhi Studios / Lalit Kala Akademi regional centres.

Key points

• Matrix — the inked surface that makes the print; without a repeatable matrix it is a monotype, not an edition.
• Relief — ink on the raised surface, whites cut away, lowest pressure, no acid.
• Intaglio — ink in recesses below the surface, wiped clean on top, heavy press, damp paper, leaves a plate mark.
• Screen printing — ink pushed through an open mesh stencil; the only family that needs no press and prints unreversed.
• Reduction print — one relief block progressively cut, light colours first; earlier states are unrecoverable.
• Drypoint burr — the raised metal ridge that gives the soft dark line; it collapses in 20–40 impressions.
• Aquatint — fused rosin dots let acid bite tonal areas; stop-out plus stepped bites build the tonal scale.
• Mezzotint — the only intaglio method that works dark to light, by scraping a rocked plate.
• Biting time — the main control of tone in etching; deeper bite holds more ink and prints darker.
• Mordant choice — ferric chloride/copper sulphate for low-toxicity studios; nitric acid bites fast but gasses.
• Viscosity printing — Krishna Reddy's single-plate multicolour method using inks of differing viscosity.
• Mesh count — threads/cm; high count gives fine detail and a thin ink film, low count a heavy deposit.
• Off-contact — 1–3 mm gap that makes the mesh snap off the sheet and keeps edges sharp.
• Photo-emulsion rule — exposed emulsion hardens and blocks; unexposed emulsion washes out and prints.
• Registration — the system (kento, pins, lays, mylar) that holds every colour in the same place on every sheet.
• Edition notation — pencil, bottom margin: number/total left, title centre, signature and year right; APs about 10%.
• BAT (bon à tirer) — the approved proof every impression in the edition must match.
• Chine collé — a thin coloured paper bonded to the sheet during printing, in the same pass.
• Mirror reversal — relief, intaglio and lithography reverse the image; screen printing does not.
• Archival practice — 100% cotton acid-free paper, flat drying under weight, glassine interleaving, solander storage.

Formulas and examples

Example 1 — Edition sheet count and paper cost. An edition of 40 linocuts plus 4 APs, 1 BAT and 1 PP, with 10% spoilage on a 3-colour reduction print.

• Good sheets needed = 40 + 4 + 1 + 1 = 46.
• Spoilage at 10% = 4.6 → round up to 5. Sheets to buy = 51.
• Paper at ₹120 per sheet → 51 × 120 = ₹6,120.
• Ink and block ₹1,400; studio time 18 h at ₹150/h = ₹2,700. Total cost = 6,120 + 1,400 + 2,700 = ₹10,220.
• Cost per saleable print = 10,220 ÷ 40 = ₹255.50; at a ₹1,500 retail price the gross margin is ₹1,244.50 per print (82.9%).

Example 2 — Paper grammage and soaking. A 300 gsm cotton sheet, 56 cm × 76 cm, for intaglio.

• Area = 0.56 × 0.76 = 0.4256 m².
• Dry mass = 300 × 0.4256 = 127.68 g.
• After soaking it holds roughly 30% of its mass in water: 0.30 × 127.68 ≈ 38.3 g of water, so the damp sheet weighs about 166 g.
• A pack of 10 sheets dry = 1.2768 kg; at ₹110 per sheet the edition of 51 sheets in Example 1 would instead cost 51 × 110 = ₹5,610.

Example 3 — Mesh, halftone and ink quantity. A screen print of 50 × 70 cm, 90T mesh (90 threads/cm).

• Threads per inch = 90 × 2.54 = 228.6 ≈ 230 tpi.
• Safe halftone line count = 230 ÷ 4.5 ≈ 51 lpi — so a 55 lpi film is about the practical ceiling; a 85 lpi film would clog and moiré.
• Printed area if 60% of the sheet carries ink = 0.50 × 0.70 × 0.60 = 0.21 m².
• Wet film about 20 µm → ink volume = 0.21 × 20 ÷ 1000 = 0.0042 litre = 4.2 ml per pull.
• For 51 sheets per colour × 3 colours = 153 pulls → 153 × 4.2 = 643 ml, plus flood/clean-up waste of roughly 30% → about 840 ml, so a 1 kg tin per colour set is ample.

Example 4 — Acid dilution for an etch. A studio needs 2 litres of 10% nitric acid from a 68% concentrate.

• C₁V₁ = C₂V₂ → V₁ = (10 × 2000) ÷ 68 = 294 ml of concentrate.
• Water required = 2000 − 294 = 1,706 ml, and the acid is poured into the water, slowly, with ventilation on.
• A stepped aquatint on zinc in this bath might run 20 s, 60 s, 150 s, 360 s for four tones — each step roughly 2.5× the previous, because perceived darkness rises far more slowly than bite time. Exact times must be tested on a step plate, as they change with temperature and bath age.

Example 5 — Comparison table.

Where it is used

• Fine-art print studios and artist editions: Garhi Studios (Lalit Kala Akademi), Kanoria Centre for Arts Ahmedabad, Chhaap Baroda, Sanskriti Kendra; roles as studio printer, master printer, atelier assistant.
• Textile and apparel printing: screen printing of garments in Tiruppur, Ludhiana, Surat and Jaipur — plastisol and discharge printing, screen making, colour separation, production supervision.
• Signage, packaging, glass and electronics: screen printing on bottles, drums, membrane switches, dials, PCB legends, decals; roles in screen-making and ink technology.
• Publishing, galleries and auction houses: print cataloguing, authentication and condition-reporting at galleries, DAG, Saffronart and museum print rooms; identifying process marks (plate mark, mesh edge, cut grain) to tell original prints from reproductions.
• Teaching and workshops: printmaking faculty and demonstrators at BFA colleges; school and community workshops, where lino and screen are chosen for their low-chemistry safety.
• Design and merchandise studios: limited-edition posters, album art, T-shirts and gallery merchandise; many Indian independent studios run on screen printing because it needs no press and suits small batches.

Interview questions

• Q: What is the fundamental difference between relief and intaglio? A: In relief the ink sits on the raised surface and the cut-away areas print white; in intaglio the ink is held in incised recesses and the raised surface is wiped clean, so the ink is lifted out of the plate under heavy pressure.
• Q: Why must intaglio paper be damp? A: Damp cotton fibre is soft and plastic enough to be pushed into the bitten lines by the press and to lift the ink out; dry paper will not reach the ink and may crack.
• Q: How do you tell an original intaglio print from a photomechanical reproduction? A: Look for the embossed plate mark, ink standing in slight relief that can be felt, and plate tone — a reproduction has an even flat halftone dot pattern and no plate mark.
• Q: What is a reduction print, and why is it also called a suicide print? A: One block is printed in its lightest colour, then cut further for each successive darker colour; because material is removed each time, no earlier state can ever be reprinted.
• Q: How is tone created in etching? A: By aquatint — fused rosin dust lets acid bite around the particles — combined with stop-out varnish and stepped biting times; longer bites hold more ink and print darker.
• Q: Which intaglio process works from dark to light? A: Mezzotint — the whole plate is rocked to print solid black and the lights are scraped and burnished back.
• Q: What happens in photo-emulsion screen making when you expose the screen? A: UV light hardens the emulsion wherever it strikes; the areas shielded by the opaque positive stay soluble and wash out, becoming the open image areas.
• Q: What does mesh count control? A: The fineness of detail and the ink deposit — a high count (e.g. 120T) gives fine detail with a thin film, a low count (e.g. 43T) gives a heavy opaque deposit used for textiles.
• Q: Why is off-contact used in screen printing? A: A 1–3 mm gap makes the mesh peel away from the substrate immediately behind the squeegee, which prevents smearing and keeps edges crisp.
• Q: What is viscosity printing and who developed it? A: A single-plate multicolour intaglio method developed by Krishna Reddy at Atelier 17, using inks of different viscosity and rollers of different hardness so the inks reject one another and print several colours in one pass.
• Q: Why does a drypoint have a short edition life? A: The soft burr that holds the extra ink is crushed by press pressure within a few dozen impressions, after which the line becomes thin and dry — steel-facing can extend it.
• Q: What does 12/30, AP tell you, and what is a BAT? A: 12/30 is the 12th impression of an edition of 30, but it cannot also be an artist's proof — APs are numbered separately outside the edition; the BAT (*bon à tirer*) is the proof the artist approves as the standard for the whole edition.
• Q: Which of the three processes does not reverse the image, and why? A: Screen printing — the ink passes straight through the stencil onto the sheet, whereas relief, intaglio and lithography transfer a mirror image from the matrix.

Common mistakes

• Forgetting the mirror reversal and cutting text or signatures the right way round into a block or plate.
• Printing intaglio on dry paper, or over-soaking it to the point where it is sodden and the ink bleeds.
• Not bevelling and filing the plate edges — sharp edges cut the blankets and tear the damp sheet.
• Confusing the directions of mezzotint and aquatint: mezzotint goes dark to light, aquatint builds darks by progressive biting.
• Saying exposed photo-emulsion washes out — the opposite is true; exposure hardens it and the unexposed areas wash away.
• Choosing a halftone line count close to the mesh count, which gives moiré and clogged dots; keep it to about a quarter or a fifth.
• Over-inking relief blocks so the cut lines fill and the print looks muddy, instead of rolling a thin tacky even film.
• Numbering and signing carelessly — pencil only, after the edition is printed and approved, with proofs kept outside the edition count.
• Treating acid and emulsion remover as drain waste, and adding water to acid instead of acid to water.

Related topics

Painting: media and techniques · Sculpture: modelling, carving and casting · Photography: camera, light and composition · History of Indian modern art and the Bengal School · Graphic design and typography · Paper, pigments and art conservation