Until lately it was maintained that only what was drawn on stone could be got off it in a print. But Mr. Goulding, the etching printer, who has been making a series of experiments, says he can get almost as much variety of effect, by wiping the surface of the stone carefully, in a small number of prints, as he can from a copper plate (see Lecture on [the printing of Etchings]). Still, for you, the process ordinarily will end with the drawing. Even the transferring is only to be successfully done by skilled workmen, and until you can print an etching decently, it would be scarcely worth while to try a lithograph.
Considering that the process is perfectly autographic, that the materials are few and cheap, it is strange that it is so little employed at present. But a very serious attempt is being made to revive it, and as an artist like Mr. Whistler is the leader and initiator, I believe it will be successful.
Colour printing by lithography, though very complicated, might be tried by you; as many stones must be prepared for transferring the design, made either on paper or stone, from the paper to stone, or from one stone to another, as there are colours, and only that part of the design which is of one colour must appear on one stone; if you try to get colour prints in the usual fashion by printing one colour over the other, you will obtain the usual commercial muddling lithographic appearance. But if you mix your own colours for the lithographer, and have the colours placed side by side, in flat masses like the Japanese block prints (see [Wood Engraving] Lecture), you should get good results.
There are endless other processes and methods of work, but they are all more or less complicated, and require special training and special tools, and even machinery, and one who wishes to pursue the subject further must go to a lithographer and learn the trade.
But in order to get artistic effects only, one has but to draw or paint on paper or stone as one would ordinarily. The means are most simple, and the results should be most interesting.
LECTURE VIII.
ETCHING.
IN all the various methods of making illustrations to which I have so far called your attention, it was necessary that some part of the work should be done by a specially trained craftsman, at least if any practical and commercial result was desired.
Now in etching, the more you yourselves do and the less any one else does, the better should be the result.
An etching is, in its narrowest sense, a print from a metal plate into which a design has been bitten or eaten by acid; again, in most of the other methods, the printing was from relief blocks like type, and therefore those illustrations could be printed with type. Now we have to consider another sort of work, namely, intaglio, or incised, or sunken work not printed from the surface, but from lines cut below it, and therefore unavailable for letterpress printing. Of course it would be easy to make a relief block in metal, or an incised block of wood, to reverse the treatment in printing, but it would not be natural or right.