Printmaking Glossary

These rough working definitions of a few terms central to European and American printmaking are intended to help explain references to print media and techniques in captions for images on the DAC website. To explain these terms in full would require much longer descriptions, but the short explanations given here should provide a general idea of what these words mean.

Print: A replica of an image made from an inked surface. Broadly considered, the two stages of making a print are the creation of a matrix, and the pulling of an impression by inking the matrix and pressing a piece of paper against it.

Matrix: The surface (usually wood, metal, or stone) on which the image is actually made, and which is then inked in preparation for the making of each print.

Support: The material (usually paper) to which the image is transferred from the inked matrix, and which provides the image's physical support and much of its tone.

Some Printmaking Techniques Grouped by Category:

Relief: The image is created from ink held on areas not carved away from the matrix, and thus left standing above areas not to be inked. Three types of relief are:
Woodcut:: The relief image is carved from a wooden block.
Wood Engraving:: A detailed form of woodcut used for many 19th-century illustrations.
Linocut:: The relief image is carved from a linoleum surface.
Intaglio: The image is created from a metal plate which holds the ink in areas lowered below the level of the original surface. Three types of intaglio (others include drypoint, aquatint, soft-ground, etc.) are:
Engraving:: Precise grooves are cut into the plate with a sharp tool called a burin; widely used for early reproductive printmaking.
Etching:: Marks are made through an acid-resistant coating on the plate, after which the plate is bitten in a chemical bath to etch the image into the metal.
Mezzotint:: The plate is roughened uniformly with a tool called a rocker, after which the burr in certain areas is burnished (rubbed) down so it will hold less ink.
Planographic: The image on the matrix is flat, generally created by chemical means; most common is:
Lithography:: Marks made on a prepared stone are printed by means of certain inks' varying affinity for oily and watery surfaces (very loosely speaking).

"State" is a key term related to all of these processes. Two prints are of different states if they were made from a matrix which was altered (for example, by etching more lines into it) after the making of the earlier impression and before the making of the later one.

Useful resources at other museums' sites: