Discovering Print at Bradford Industrial Museum

 

Cartwright Hall Curator Andy Dalton: Lithography uses a slightly different technique. This uses, you get a stone surface, or a metal surface as well, you can use stone or metal, and you get a wax crayon, and you draw on the surface of the stone with a wax crayon, and then you get a special chemical that fixes the wax onto the surface of the stone. And then you can get a roller with lots of ink on it and...

 

Student: And put it on top of it.

 

Andy:...that's right, you roll it across the lithographic stone. And because of the way that the chemical treats the stone surface, the ink sticks to the waxy bits that you've drawn...

 

Student: We have a plastic template that we put underneath and it comes out...

 

Andy: That's similar way of doing it. And then you can put your paper down, rub the back of it, and when you pull it away it leaves a drawing on the paper's surface. And that way of printing is what you see all over today. So in books and catalogues and newspapers, lots of different ways and lithography was the way it was used to make printing.

 

You can see by this image, this is...this is an image of London, actually, it's actually of Brixton. IT's by an artist called Anthony Davis, and he lived in London and also Londonderry in the 1970s and 80s and he was really interested in the different characters that he met in the city at the time. But, his very particular way of working with lithography. Now, what do you think the benefits of working on a lithograph are to working on an etching? What's the difference between those two images?

 

Student: Working on stone would be much easier?

 

Andy: Working on stone would be much easier because you can just draw straight on. You don't have to dig and etch and mark the surface of it. But what else? What's different about this picture-

 

Student: Colour?

 

Andy: Colour! Colour - it's much easier to make coloured images with lithography than it is with etching, because with etching you have to get lots of plates and register them up and print them one on top of the other and you've got heavy thicking and it all tend to get a bit muddy and stodgy if you're not careful. The great thing about lithography is that you can then transfer your drawing to lots of different stones so you can one for blue, one for red, one for black, one for yellow and keep printing different layers off different stones...

 

Student: In different colours.