Month: November 2023

Printing Limited Editions

One of the wonderful attributes of original printmaking is that, once you have created the plate, you can choose how many times to print it.  More than one person  can acquire your original work because each impression pulled from the plate is an original print.  There are a variety of factors that influence the number in a limited edition of original hand-pulled prints.

Deciding on edition size

Lion, drypoint on plexiglass, ed. 5

Most of my editions are around 25.  This number was arrived at rather arbitrarily, thinking about the number of hours that go into developing a plate, and the relatively low price collectors will pay for a print as opposed to an oil painting, especially for a young artist just starting out.  I toyed with an edition of 40 and a few editions of 16 or 20, before deciding that 25 seemed like a good number.  Some plates have  a naturally limited number. Drypoint on plexiglass, for example, only holds up for about 5 prints before it loses it’s special line qquality. Drypoint on zinc may hold up for 20 oe 25 before you can see the wear on the plate.  Other plates, such as a zinc etching or a collagraph made from Masonite and acrylic medium, may physically hold up for considerably  larger editions.

There may be market reasons to increase the size of the editions.  There was a period of time during which my work was represented by a wholesaler to the design trade.  Because of the investment they would make in marketing materials (this was before the internet and easy digital reproduction and distribution of marketing materials), they needed the editions to be no smaller than 100 and and requested even larger editions of 150 for some images.  

I knew that technically this should be feasible – zinc plate should hold up for that many prints, I had been told, though I had not printed an edition that large.  My collograph plates seemed likely to be even more durable, being well coated with acrylic medium as a final coat regardless of what materials went into creatin

Anthurium, collagraph

g the plate.  That sounded like a huge number  to print, but they were willing to buy prints outright in lots of 10  or 20 at a time rather than take them on consignment, so I was willing to set larger editions for those works.   You will find a few editions from that time period that number up to 150.  Read more >

Indian Summer, viscosity etching, ed. 20.  Entire edition printed at once in 1982

ensuring consistent prints can be achieved

Since most of my plates require multiple colors of ink and the wiping of the plate  involves strategies to blend colors or retain discrete areas of color, I started making detailed notes.  I wrote “recipes” for the colors, especially when mixing several to get an exact hue.  Wiping plans  included the order of application of color to the plate, and how “clean” each color was to be wiped before application of the next color and sometimes even which direction to drag the rag across the plate.  Finally, I saved packets of color in aluminum foil and sealed in sandwich bags, to have a sample of the ink to use in mixing a matching  batch later, if necessary.

I tried to always take these steps in order to ensure consistent results, and over the years I found them to be very helpful..There are a number of editions that have been printed incrementally in batches of 5 or so at a time.

Deciding whether to Print  the entire edition at once

In the early years, I printed editions out and canceled the plate before moving on to the  next print.  This changed when show deadlines started to come up faster than I could print out all that edition work.  It was important to create new work for the shows so I bagan to print out a few for each plate – the “bon a tirer” or match print, which would remain in my records, and then numbers 1-3 or 1-5 – enough to get the prints for the show and maybe have a matted impression or twp for the bin as well.

Quickly this became the practice, because making new work is always more fun than printing out the edition even when there are no deadline pressures!  Not to mention that having entire editions printed is a significant investment in paper, ink, and time – and storage space.  It does feel awkward to me to sign the Certificates of Authenticity with a statement that the plate WILL be canceled when the edition is complete, instead of that is HAS BEEN canceled.

Because many of my etchings are printed in multiple colors in the á la poupée technique, and it takes a number of trials to get the image right in the first place, I was concerned about how to effectively produce matching prints at a later time.

Read more >