For hundreds of years, artists and printers have been experimenting with techniques to print color on paper.

Following the dominance of woodcut and etching processes in the early modern period, the invention of lithography in the 1790s — and color lithography (chromolithography) in the mid-19th century — made it possible to produce printed images in color on a large scale. 

The introduction of screenprinting in the 20th century offered artists another medium through which to print and layer multiple rich, opaque colors. Today, contemporary artists continue to experiment with color across all of these printing methods.

Let’s look closer at four printing processes: woodcut, etching, lithography, and pochoir/screenprint. 

Woodcut

The oldest print technique is the woodcut, which first appeared in China in the 9th century. In the 14th century, Western European artists took up the woodcut, initially using it to stamp designs onto textiles. 

To make a woodcut, known as a relief print, an artist draws a composition on a block of wood and then uses chisels, knives, and gouges to cut away areas of the wood that are not meant to be printed. Ink is applied to the woodblock’s raised areas. When the woodcut is printed, only the parts of the block that are raised print ink onto the paper, while the cut-away areas leave the paper white.

Most early woodcuts were monochrome, meaning they were printed with black ink on paper. Exceptions were hand-colored woodcuts, including a 1493 woodcut with hand-applied watercolor by Michael Wolgemut from The Nuremberg Chronicle. 

The other exceptions were chiaroscuro woodcuts, an early form of color printing in Europe. To create an illusion of depth, artists printed the same sheet of paper with multiple woodblocks inked with different colors, fabricating depth with a contrast in tones, called chiaroscuro. Indeed, the term “chiaroscuro” comes from the Italian for “light” (chiaro) and “shade” (scuro). 

In part inspired by Japanese color woodblocks, such as Kitagawa Utamaro’s A Cool Evening at Ryogoku Bridge in Edo, from ca. 1806–1815, European and American artists revived the woodcut in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, making bold and expressive prints, such as Erich Heckel’s Portrait of a Man (1919). Heckel printed this woodcut by hand, brushing ocher, blue, and green directly on the wood blocks for a painterly effect.

Etching 

First developed in the early 16th century, etching is an intaglio (from the Italian intagliare, meaning “to incise”) technique that evolved from methods used to decorate metal armor. After covering a metal plate with an acid-resistant varnish called a “ground,” the artist draws a composition on the plate’s surface with an etching needle, removing the ground and exposing areas of the plate. The plate is then dropped into a tub of acid, which etches, or “bites,” the image in any exposed part of the metal plate.

Etching has remained popular with artists since its invention, because of the ease with which they can draw a composition on metal. Most early examples of color etchings are monochrome with hand-colored additions, such as View of the Temple of Isis at Pompeii (1781–1784).

Etching has a rich history in the San Francisco Bay Area. At Crown Point Press in downtown San Francisco, Kiki Smith (b. 1954) explored color aquatint, a printing technique that uses acid to create tonal effects.

Across the Bay, in Berkeley, Alicia McCarthy (b. 1969) worked with printers at Paulson Fontaine Press to produce ZAPCRLM, an 84-color aquatint prepared à la poupée, a process in which multiple colors are applied separately onto a single plate that is pulled through the press.

Lithography 

Invented by Alois Senefelder in Germany in the 1790s, lithography quickly appealed to printers in Europe because of its ease and efficiency. First, an image is drawn onto the flat surface of a limestone block with an oil crayon. Then the image is fixed onto the surface with a chemical mixture and dampened with water that is repelled by the oil marks. When an oil-based ink is applied to the stone, it adheres only to the original drawing, which is then transferred onto a sheet of paper via a printing press. Color lithography involves using multiple stones to print an image. Each stone is inked with a different color, then printed on paper in layers.

In the second half of the 19th century, technological advances made using multiple stones to print a color image much easier and faster. The period welcomed a flourishing of original artistic output in color lithography, particularly in 1890s Paris, such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901)’s exuberant poster Confetti from 1894. The hands that playfully throw confetti onto the female figure echo the artist’s act of splattering color onto the lithographic stone (his famous crachis, or splatter technique).

The medium experienced a revival in the United States after World War II, with presses such as Gemini G.E.L. producing modern artists’ innovative color lithographs. Willie Cole (b. 1955) created Pressed Iron Blossom #2 in 2005 at the renowned lithography workshop Tamarind Institute.

Pochoir and Screenprint

Popular techniques in the 20th century, pochoir and screenprint are both stencil processes. 

Pochoir is a process in which color is applied by hand using brushstrokes on precisely registered stencils laid out on paper. A French term, pochoir is a labor-intensive handcraft that became widely used by artists in France in the 1920s and 1930s, making possible the brilliant reproduction of color that could not be achieved with other printing techniques or photography.

Sonia Delaunay-Terk (French, b. Ukraine, 1885–1979) used pochoir to produce her 1913 artist book The Prose of the Trans-Siberian. This unusually formatted book is representative of a period of innovative book production in the avant-garde milieu of 1913 Paris. It’s more than six feet in length when fully unfolded. 

Screenprinting emerged from commercial sign printing in the 1930s United States. As with pochoir, no printing press is required to produce a screenprint. A printer creates a screen by stretching mesh or silk across a frame, then they mask out areas using images made from paper or glue. When ink is applied through the screen using a squeegee, it does not pass through the masked sections, leaving those areas of the paper white. Attracted to screenprinting’s bold colors, flat surfaces, and ties to commercial visual culture, Pop artists in the 1960s, such as Andy Warhol and Corita Kent, embraced the medium.