Printmaking as Play

Printmaking has been an activity of mine for decades so I found this article particularly interesting. Of course a great number of printmaking methods have been employed over centuries. Classics include block printing, etching, engraving, lithography, monotype. My preferred method has been screenprinting which like the other techniques has many variations. All told I imagine there are about as many ways to make prints as there are computer languages. ;-)

The author writes about using the Risograph which I knew nothing about before reading the article. The idea of using heat to transfer a toner-like material sounded rather familiar. It reminded me of the "solid-ink" printer made by Tektronix a long time ago. I owned one of those printers and used it for quite a few years. It worked by melting blocks of dye-containing resin and spraying the molten "ink" onto the stock. It produced some pretty interesting prints, but alas the problem was lack of archival performance. Seems the dyes used were subject to fairly rapid fading. In terms of the intended purposes of the Tek printer that was acceptable. After all it was nominally a business tool, definitely not sold for artistic creation.

It's probably worth mentioning that the paper printouts of ordinary laser printers can be used as a kind of lithographic "plate". That works because the plastic-matrix printed areas are inherently oil wettable. So dampening the paper and using an oil-based printing ink to coat the laser-printed areas allows producing a limited number of prints from the laser-printed matrix. The result is a low-medium resolution print that with the right image can be quite attractive. Anyway laser printing is another heat-based process printmakers have exploited.

Always fun to learn about a printmaking technique I didn't know about before!

By the way, there’s a follow-up article where the author shares more details about the technique she developed: https://www.nobadmemories.com/blog/2022/05/mimeoprinting

Fuck yea. I haven’t seen shit this good in ages. This person is brilliant and they are onto something big here.