Old-fashioned printing technology brought to life on the Web

Even as digital cameras are replacing film and CDs have replaced vinyl (vinyl?... what's vinyl?), digital alternatives are taking over in the fields of the printed word and the printed work(DRAWING?). Books and newspapers (once produced exclusively with hand-set type) are increasingly going straight from the computer to presses - or even directly from computer to paper. Meanwhile, artistic reproductions (the traditional territory of lithographs and silk screens) are shifting toward Iris prints and other forms of digital output. And yet, while the computer is pushing these well established methods to the fringe, it's also helping to preserve their story via the Web - and sites like What is a Print? and the Briar Press remind visitors that there were print media before desktop publishing.

The legacy of a 2001 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, What is a Print takes a Flash-based tour of the four most common methods of manually creating artistic prints - woodcut, etching, lithography, and screen print. While the opening line of the exhibition, "A print is a work of art made up of ink on paper and existing in multiple examples," could easily apply to output from the trusty inkjet sitting beside your computer, the methods covered here have a somewhat longer history.

Using Flash to do more than simply add a bit of glitter to the site, What is a Print draws on the application's interactive capabilities to pull viewers' attention to what they might otherwise consider a dry subject, and to help make sense of unfamiliar processes. (Woodcuts - or 'potato-cuts' as we knew them in elementary school - are fairly straightforward, but an understanding of lithography is made much clearer with a step-by-step explanation.)

After a brief introduction to the subject, visitors can choose any of the four printing methods and begin the tour - and at this point, interactivity takes center stage as visitors are invited to personally complete each stage of the printing process. Using woodcuts as an example, viewers are presented with a block of wood and text summary of each step of the procedure. First instructed to click and drag a chisel across the surface of the block in order to reveal the carved image, the virtual artist then uses a roller to place ink on the raised surface of the block, and applies a sheet of paper to create the finished print. Similar 'virtual hands-on' presentations are offered for the other three methods as well, and if you'd rather watch the site do all the dirty work, each step can be run automatically.

Having learned the techniques, visitors are also able to place each kind of printmaking into its artistic context, as each style's lessons are accompanied by a Gallery of famous prints. Examples range from the works of Gauguin and Munch for woodcuts, to Matisse's etchings and Picasso's lithographs, to Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Robert Indiana for screenprints. (You may not recognize Indiana's name, but you will remember his "Love" design if you lived during the late 60s.)

Page: 1 | 2