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Original Lithography

What is the Lithography Process?

text by Russell Chatham

Artist Russell Chatham and pressman Geoff HarveyThe average person has no way of understanding exactly what constitutes an original lithograph. Most people assume it is a print of something else, and that there is an original which has either been copied somehow or been photographed and reproduced through some mechanical technique. There is definitely a basis for this assumption because thousands of such reproductions have been sold as limited edition prints, but are in fact nothing more than photographs of paintings printed on regular commercial presses using the ordinary technology known as four-color process printing.

So what do they mean by limited editions? In fine art printing, whether it’s an etching, lithograph, engraving or serigraph, five hundred is more or less the unspoken cutoff point. But in these process reproductions, believe or not, that number could be three thousand, ten thousand or even twenty-five thousand, depending entirely on what the market might bear. The question then is what are these pieces of paper actually worth in the long run? No doubt there is sentimental value to some, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But in terms of intrinsic or collector value, the correct answer is often little or nothing. Yet, certain dealers do not hesitate to assure buyers that such prints are sure to increase in value with age.

The same may be said of what is known as a giclee—a newer, more profitable computer-generated imagery. Slip a photo of a painting into the machine and out comes a perfect reproduction of it in any size you want. Need a thousand? Ten thousand? Push the button. Or better yet, print on demand. Giclee means spraying ink in French, a reference to how these digital images are printed. It sounds exotic, or mysterious, and people are routinely paying thousands for something that may only be worth the cost of the paper it is printed on.

To understand what an original lithograph is, you need to know how one is produced. First of all, there is no original in the sense that’s just been discussed. There is however, a concept which lives inside the artist’s head. Think of it as a brick wall. You know where it’s going to be, how long, high, and wide. You have mortar and bricks, maybe a stretched string so it comes out straight. Then you start laying bricks until it’s done. How many bricks did it take? Who cares, it took exactly how many were needed, no more, no less. The point is that the wall only came into existence when it was done and not before.

The first step in bringing forth the imagined image is to create a drawing, which will serve as the first key plate, usually, but not always, printed in black ink. This first plate acts as a map for everything that follows, so it must be done carefully.

First Key Plate

As with watercolor painting, lithographic inks are completely transparent, and so you cannot make corrections. Following this first drawing plate are the colors, one at a time, each one a separate plate drawn by hand. These plates could take as little as twenty or thirty minutes to make, or as long as twenty or thirty hours depending on their

After 10 color plates

complexity. The number of colors, or plates, used in any given lithograph is never the same. It simply takes how many it takes. In my work, that number has varied from seventeen to fifty-four in the production of more than one hundred and thirty editions over the course of the last thirty years.

Generally speaking, you can print two colors in a day if there are no complications, however, there usually are. Each ink color must be mixed by eye using the primary

After 16 color plates

colors, and what you see on the mixing table is often not what you get on paper. When this happens, modifications have to be made, or worse, you have to clean up and start over. To make one original lithograph can easily require two-hundred hours of both the

printer’s and the artist’s time.

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