The illustrator finds that the speech an author puts into the mouths of his characters is the best index to their personality. They may be described as tall or short, dark or light, stout or thin, and their creator may explain their capacities for love, hate, villany, or dissipation, but it is only the words with which they express their ideas that really describes them. His description of the beauty of a girl will not be accepted on trust. He must supply her with deportment and breeding before her beauty can be truly imagined. Thus it may be explained that the measure of an author's conception and clearness often determines the qualities in an illustration. The true illustrator is sensitive to faults in the delineation of character, and, although he may not be aware of it, his work will show it. Of course it often happens that an artist is taken up with ideas of technique and, author or no author, will make his pictures in just such a way; but such work is hardly illustration and serves itself better standing alone.
And thus it goes throughout the scene to be pictured—place, time, and people, all must be imagined twice and equally clear, by both the author and the illustrator, before the reader will agree.
To the illustrator, hampered by given quantities, falls the most difficult task in this duet of imagination, and he can at best hope only for the reader's approval, as all credit for conception goes to the author. It is on this approval, though, that he builds, for if he succeeds in making things clearer to the reader's imagination, he has accomplished what he set out to do and has proved himself worth his hire.
So the aims of illustration are set forth, but whether the laborer completes his work well or ill, whether he brings great ability or only honest intention to its accomplishment, he is engaged in a business as fascinating as it is uncertain. Failure only drives him to another try, and success is always just around the corner. The illustrator who would live by his work must live with it. If he has a thought in his mind that does not deal in some form with illustrations and half-tone plates, he is wasting that thought and his time besides.[Back to Contents]
HALF-TONE, LINE, AND COLOR PLATES
By Emlyn M. Gill
Practically all book illustrations, as well as those in catalogues and periodicals of all kinds, are made by some method of photo-engraving. Wood engraving is almost a thing of the past, and many who are in a position to know predict that after the present generation of wood engravers has passed out of existence, artistic wood engraving will be a lost art. It is certain that there is now no younger school of wood engravers growing up to take the place of the engravers whose work in the leading magazines, up to a few years ago, made them famous.
The quickly made and comparatively inexpensive process plates have not only taken the place of wood engraving, but have increased the field of illustration to a very large extent. They have made possible hundreds and even thousands of publications which could not have existed in the old days of expensive wood engraving. The use of photo-engraved plates has increased enormously each year during the past twenty years, and with this increased use has come the inevitable decrease in cost, so that illustrations are no longer much of a luxury to the publisher.
Photography is the basis of all the mechanical processes that come under the general head of photo-engraving. These processes are generally called mechanical, yet, as in photography, great skill is required to produce the best results. The higher grades of half-tone work require much careful finishing, which is all done by hand, and which, moreover, must be done by a skilful, intelligent, and artistic engraver. Practically all things may be reproduced successfully by photo-engraving, but the vast majority of subjects that go to the photo-engraver are either photographs or drawings.
All methods of relief plate photo-engraving come under two general heads: "Half-tone" and "line engraving," the latter being very generally known as "zinc etching." Zinc etching is the simplest method of photo-engraving and should be thoroughly understood before one begins to inquire into the intricacies of the half-tone process. It is used to reproduce what is known as "black and white" work, or line drawings. Any drawing or print having black lines or dots on a white background, without any middle shades, may be engraved by this process. The old-fashioned "wet-plate" photography is used in making practically all process plates, either in line or half-tone.
I will describe briefly all the operations gone through in making a line plate, taking for a subject a map drawn in black ink on white paper or a head drawn by Charles Dana Gibson,—subjects wide apart in an artistic way, but of absolutely equal values so far as making the plate is concerned. The drawing is first put on a copy board in front of a camera made especially for this work, in whose holder the wet plate has already been placed by the operator. The subject may be enlarged or reduced to any desired size, nearly all drawings being made much larger than they are desired to be reproduced in the plates. The exposure is much longer than in ordinary dry plate work, generally lasting in the neighborhood of five minutes. The result is a black and white negative. That is, the lines that were black in the drawing are absolutely clear and transparent in the negative, but the rest of the negative is black. From the photographer, the negative goes to the "negative-turning" room. Here the negative is coated with solutions of collodion and rubber cement, which makes the film exceedingly tough—so tough that it is easily stripped from the glass on which it was made, and is "turned" with the positive side up on another sheet of glass. If this were not done, the plate would be reversed in printing—that is, a line of type would read from right to left, or backward. After the negative is "turned," it is ready for the etching room. Here the surface of a sheet of zinc about one-sixteenth of an inch thick, which has been polished until it is as smooth as plate glass and without a scratch or a flaw of any kind, is flowed with a sensitized solution, easily affected by light. The negative is placed in a printing frame over the sensitized zinc and a print is made. That is, it is exposed to the sunlight or to a powerful electric light, and the light shines through the transparent parts of the negative, and hardens the sensitized surface; while the black part of the negative protects the sensitized surface from the action of the light. The plate is next "rolled up" with a lithograph roller which distributes a thin coating of etching ink over the entire surface. The plate is then washed off carefully by the operator, but the ink adheres to all portions of the plate that have been acted upon by the light. We now have a fully developed print on the highly polished surface of the zinc that is an exact reproduction of the original drawing. It is now necessary to make this print acid proof, and this is done by covering the plate with a coating of very fine resinous powder, called "dragon's blood," which adheres to the printed portions of the plate. The plate is subjected to enough heat to melt this powder, and is then ready for the acid bath.