Part 3

A well-etched block should feel sharp yet smooth to the thumb and fingers, as if it were cut. A badly etched or over-etched block has an altogether different feel: scratchy, and repulsive to the touch. Frequently it happens that by carelessness or mischance the process-man will over-etch a block; that is to say, he will allow it to remain in the acid-bath a minute or so too long, so that the upstanding lines become partly eaten away by the fluid. The result, when printed, is a wretched ghost of the original drawing. An over-etched block, or a good block in which the lines appear too thin and the reproduction in consequence weak, can be remedied in degree by being rubbed down with oilstone. This, if the lines are not under-etched, thickens the upstanding metal and produces a heavier print. But some of the smaller process firms have an ingenious, if none too honest, practice of pulling a proof from the _unetched_ plate, and sending it along with the defective block. This can readily be done by inking up the image with a roller before printing, and then passing the thin plate of metal through a lithographic press, or through a transfer press, such as is to be found in every process establishment. Of course the print thus secured is a perfect replica in little of the original drawing, and looks eminently satisfactory. One can generally identify these proofs before etching by their backs, which have, of course, not the slightest marks of the pressure usually to be discerned upon even the most carefully prepared proofs of finished blocks. The surface of a zinc block sometimes becomes oxidized by the acid used in etching not having been thoroughly washed off. This may occur at once if the acid is strong, and then it generally happens that the block is irretrievably ruined; but if oxidation occurs after some time, it is generally superficial, and can be rubbed down. The process of oxidation begins with an efflorescence, which may be best rubbed down with a thick stick of charcoal, broken across the grain. But zinc blocks are frequently ruined by carelessness in the printing-office after printing. When the printing has been done it is customary to clean type and blocks from the printing-ink by scrubbing them with a brush dipped in what printers call “lye”—that is, a solution of pearl-ash—which, although it does not injure the leaden types, is apt to corrode the zinc of which most process blocks are made, if they are not carefully and immediately washed in water and dried. A block with its surface destroyed in this manner prints miserably, with a fuzzy appearance. The easiest way of protecting blocks from becoming oxidized is to allow the printing-ink to remain on them, or if you have none, rub them over with tallow.

Examples will now be shown of the varying results obtainable from the same drawings by different processes.

The drawing representing a _Misty Day at Bolt Head_ was made upon common rough paper, such as is usually found in sailors’ log-books; in fact, it was a log-book the present writer used during the greater part of a tour in Devon, nothing else being obtainable in those parts save the cloth-bound, gold-lettered sketch-books whose porterage convicts one at once of amateurishness. And here let me say that a sailor’s log-book, though decidedly an unconventional medium for sketching in, seems to be entirely admirable. The paper takes pencil excellently well, and the faint blue parallel lines with which the pages are ruled need bother no one; they will not (being blue) reproduce. To save the freshness of the impression, the sketch was lightly finished in ink, and sent for reproduction uncleaned. The illustration shows the result. It is an example of the bitumen process, whose original sin of exaggerating all the pencil marks which it has been good enough to reproduce at all is partly cloaked by the intervention of hand-work all over the block. You can see how continually the graver has been put through the lines to produce a greyness, yet how unsatisfactory the result!

The drawing was now sent for reproduction by the swelled gelatine process. The result is a much more satisfactory block. Everything that the original contained has been reproduced. The sullen blacknesses of the pinnacled rocks are nothing extenuated, as they were in the first example, where they seem comparatively insignificant, and the technical qualities of pen and pencil are retained throughout, and can readily be identified. The same remarks apply even more strongly to the small blocks from the _Note at Gorran_.

But such a pure pen-drawing as that of _Charlwood_, shown here in blocks by (1) Messrs. Dawson’s swelled gelatine process, and (2) by Mr. Chefdeville’s sympathetic handling of the albumen process, would have come almost equally well by bitumen, or by an ordinary practitioner’s treatment of albumen. It offered no technical difficulties, and there is exceedingly little to choose between these two blocks. Careful examination would show that a very slight thickening of line had taken place throughout the block by the gelatine method, and this must ever be the distinguishing difference between that process and those in which acids are used to eat away the metal of the block—that the gelatine renders at its best every jot and tittle of a drawing, and would by the nature of the process rather exaggerate than diminish; and that in those processes in which acids play a part, the process-man must be ever watchful lest his zinc plate be “over-etched”—lest the upstanding metal lines be eaten away to a scratchy travesty of the original drawing. But you will see that although the lines in the swelled gelatine _Charlwood_ are appreciably thicker than in its albumen fellow, yet the latter prints darker. The explanation is in the metals of which the two blocks are composed. Zinc prints more heavily than copper.

It should not be forgotten that, to-day, hand-work upon process-blocks is become very usual. To paraphrase a well-worn political catch-phrase, the old methods have been called in to redress the vagaries of the new: the graver has been retained to correct the crudities of the rocking-bath. To be less cryptic, the graver is used nowadays to tone down the harsh and ragged edges of the etched zinc. Here is an illustration that will convey the idea to perfection. Here is, in this _View from the Tower Bridge Works_, a zincographic block, grounded with bitumen and etched by the aid of acids. The original drawing was made upon Bristol-board, with Stephens’ ebony stain, and an F nib of Mitchell’s make. The size of that drawing was twelve and a half inches across; the sky drawn in with much elaboration. A first proof showed a sky harsh and wanting in aërial perspective. A graver was put through it, cutting up the lines into dots, and thus putting the sky into proper relation with the rest of the picture.

Another interesting and suggestive comparison is between photogravure, or heliogravure, as it is sometimes called, and type-printing processes for the reproduction of line. The frontispiece to this volume is a heliogravure plate by Dujardin, of Paris, from a pen-drawing that offered no obstacles to adequate reproduction by the bitumen process. In fact, you see it here, reproduced in that way, and of the same size. The copper intaglio plate is in every way superior to the relief block, as might have been expected. The hardness of the latter method gives way, in the heliogravure plate, to a delightful softness, even when the plate is clean-wiped and printed in as bald and artless a fashion as a tradesman’s business card; but now it is printed with care and with the _retroussage_ that is generally the meed of the etching, you could not have distinguished it _from_ an etching had you not been told its history.

The procedure in making a heliogravure is in this wise:—A copper plate, similar to the kind used by etchers, receives a ground of bichromatized bitumen. A photograph is taken of the drawing to be reproduced, and from the negative thus obtained a _positive_ is made. The positive, in reverse, is placed upon the grounded plate and printed upon it. The bitumen which has been printed upon by the action of light is thus rendered wholly insoluble, and the image of the drawing remains the only soluble portion of the ground. The plate is then treated with turpentine, and the soluble lines thus dissolved. Follows then the ordinary etching procedure. This is a more simple and ready process than the making of a relief block. It is, however, more expensive to commission, but then expense never is any criterion of original cost. The printing, though, is a heavy item, because, equally with etchings or mezzotints, it must be printed upon a copper-plate press, and this involves the cleaning and the re-inking of the plate with every impression.

The subject which the present plate bears does not show the utmost capabilities of the heliogravure. It was chosen as a fair example to show the difference between two methods without straining the limitations of the relief block. But if the drawing had been most carefully graduated in intensity from the deepest black to the palest brown, the copper plate would have shown everything with perfect ease. Large editions of these plates are not to be printed without injury, because the constant wiping of the soft copper wears down the surface. But to obviate this defect a process of _acierage_ has been invented, by which a coating of iron is electrically deposited upon the surface of the plate, rendering it, practically, as durable as a steel engraving.

It is by experiments we learn to achieve distinction; by immediate failure that we rise to ultimate success; and ofttimes by pure chance that we discover in these days some new trick of method by which process shall do for the illustrator something it has not done before. There is still, no doubt, in the memory of many, that musty anecdote of the painter who, fumbling over the proper rendering of foam, applied by some accident a sponge to the wet paint, and lo! there, by happy chance, was the foam which had before been like nothing so much as wool.

In the same way, I suppose, some draughtsman discovered splatter-work. He may readily be imagined, prior to this lucky chance, painfully stippling little dots with his pen; pin-points of ink stilted and formal in effect when compared with the peculiarly informal concourse of spots produced by taking a small, stiff-bristled brush (say a toothbrush), inking it, and then, holding the bristles downwards and inclining toward the drawing, more or less vigorously stroking the inky bristles _towards_ one with a match-stick. Holding the brush thus, and stroking it in this way, the bristles send a shower of ink spots upon the drawing. Of course this trick requires an extended practice before it can be performed in workmanlike fashion, and even then the parts not required to be splattered have to be carefully covered with cut-paper masks. [_Mem._—To use a fixed ink for drawings on which you intend to splatter, because it is extremely probable that you will require to paint some portions out with Chinese white, and Chinese white upon any inks that are not fixed is the despair of the draughtsman.] Here is an excellent example of splatter. It is by that resourceful American draughtsman, Harry Fenn. Indeed, the greatest exponents of this method are Americans: few men in this country have rendered it with any frequency, or with much advantage. I have essayed its use to aid this sunset view of _Black Rock_, and to me it seems to come well. But the finer spots are very difficult of reproduction; some are lost here. There is a most ingenious contrivance, an American notion, I believe, for the better application of splatter. It is called the air-brush, and it consists of a tube filled with ink, and fitted with a description of nozzle through which the ink is projected on to paper by a pneumatic arrangement worked by the artist by means of a treadle. You aim the affair at your drawing, work your treadle, and the trick is done. The splatter is remarkably fine and equable, and its intensity can be regulated by the distance at which the nozzle is held from the drawing. The greater advantage, however, in the use of the air-brush would seem to lie with the lithographic draughtsmen, who have to cover immense areas of work.

Here follows an experiment with diluted inks: the drawing made upon HP Whatman with all manner of nibs. It is all pen-work, worked with black stain, and with writing ink watered down to different values. This is an attempt to render as truthfully as possible (and as unconventionally) the sunset shine and shadow of a lonely shore, blown upon with the wild winds of the Channel. A little stream, overgrown with bents and waving rushes, flows between a break in the low cliffs and loses itself in the sands. The sun sets behind the ruined house, and between it and the foreground is a clump of storm-bent trees, constrained to their uneasy inward pose not by present breezes, but to this shrinking habit of growth by long-continued stress of weather. The block is by Gillot, of Paris, who was asked to get the appearance of the original drawing in a line-block. This he has not altogether succeeded in doing: perhaps it was impossible; but the _feeling_ is here. It is a line-block, rouletted all over in the attempt to get the effect produced by watered inks. The roulettes, by which these greynesses are produced, are peculiar instruments, consisting of infinitesimal wheels of hard steel whose edges are fashioned into microscopically small points or facets. Mounted at the end of a stick more nearly resembling a penholder than anything else, the wheel is driven along (and into) the surface of the metal by pressure, making small indentations in it. There are varieties of roulettes, the differences between them lying in the patterns of the projections from the wheel. The varieties in the texture of rouletting seen in this print are thus explained.

Now come some experiments in mixtures. The mixed drawing has many possibilities of artistic expression, and here are some essays in mixtures, harnessed to tentative employments of process.

First is this experiment in pen and pencil reproduced in half-tone. It is a view of _Chepstow Castle_—that really picturesque old border fortress—from across the river Wye, a river that comes rushing down from the uplands with an impetuous current full of swirls and eddies. The town of Chepstow lies at the back, represented in this drawing only by its lights. The huts and sheds that straggle down to the waterside, and the rotting pier, where small vessels load and unload insignificant cargoes, are commonplace enough, but they go to make a fine composition; and the last sunburst in the evening sky, the stars already brilliant, and the white gleams from the hurrying river, are immensely valuable, and things of joy to the practitioner in black and white. Rain had fallen during the day, and, when the present writer sat down to sketch, still lent a fine impending juicy air to the scene that seemed incapable of adequate translation into pure line; therefore, upon the pencil sketch was added pen-work, and to that more pencil, and, when finished, the drawing was sent to be processed, with special instructions that the white spaces in the sky should be preserved, together with those on the buildings, but that all else might acquire the light grey tint which the half-tone always gives, as of a drawing made upon paper of a silvery grey. In the result you can see this purely arbitrary, but delightful, ground tint everywhere; it gives absolutely the appearance of a drawing made upon tinted cardboard, but, truly, the only paper employed was a common, rough make, that would be despised of the lordly amateur. Here you see the half-tone process on its best behaviour, and I think it has secured a very notable result.

Here is another experiment, _Clifford’s Inn: a Foggy Night_—a mixture of pen and ink and crayon worked upon with a stump, and then lightly brushed over with a damp, not a full, brush; the lights in the windows and the reflections taken out with the point of an eraser.

It should be said that in drawing thus for half-tone reproduction the drawing should be made much more emphatic than the print is intended to appear; that is to say, the deepest shadows should be given an additional depth, and the fainter shading should be a shade lighter than you would give to a drawing not made with a view to publication. If these points are not borne in mind, the result is apt to be flat and featureless.

If a half-tone block exhibits these disagreeable peculiarities, high lights can always be created by the aid of a chisel used upon the metal surface of the block. The more important process firms generally employ a staff of competent engravers, who, now that wood engraving is less widely used, have turned their attention to just this kind of work—the correcting of process-blocks. The artist has but to mark his proof with the corrections and alterations he requires. The two illustrations shown on page 68, from different states of the same block, give a notion of correcting the flatness of half-tone. The second block shows a good deal of retouching in the lights taken out upon the paper and the jug, and in the hatching upon the drinking-horn.

Half-tone processes are practised in much the same way as the albumen and bitumen line methods already described, in so far as that they are worked with acids and upon zinc or copper. At first these half-tone blocks were made in zinc, but recently some reproductive firms have preferred to use copper. Messrs. Waterlow and Sons, in this country, generally employ copper for half-tone blocks from drawings or photographs. Copper prints a softer and more sympathetic line, and does not accumulate dirt so readily as zinc. All the half-tone blocks in this volume are in copper. By these processes the photographs that one sees reproduced direct from nature appear in print without the aid of the artist. They are often referred to as the Meisenbach process, because the Meisenbach Company was amongst the first to use these methods in this country. The essential difference in their working is that there is a ruled screen of glass interposed between the drawing or object to be photographed and the negative. Generally a screen of glass is closely ruled with lines crossing at right angles, and etched with hydrofluoric acid. Into the grooves thus produced, printing-ink is rubbed. The result is a close network of black lines upon glass. This screen, interposed between the sensitized plate in the camera and the object to be photographed, produces upon the negative the criss-cross appearance we see in the ultimate picture. In the half-tone reproductions by Angerer and Göschl, of Vienna, this appearance is singularly varied. The screen used by them is said to be made from white silk of the gauziest description, hung before a wall covered with black velvet in such a manner that the blackness of the velvet can be seen and photographed through the silken film. A negative is made, and from it a positive is produced, which exhibits a curiously varied arrangement of dots and meshes. The positive is used in the same way as the ruled-glass screens.

The network characteristic of half-tone relief blocks can be made fine, or medium, or coarse, as required. The fine-grained blocks are used for careful book and magazine printing, and the medium-grained for printing in the better illustrated weeklies; the coarse-grained are used for rougher printing, but still are nearly always too fine for newspaper work. The _Daily Graphic_, however, has solved the problem of printing them sufficiently well for the picture to be discerned. Beyond this the rotary steam-printing press has not yet advanced.

In appearance somewhat similar to a half-tone block, but with the tint differently applied, is the illustration of _The Village Street, Tintern: Night_. Here is a pure pen-drawing, scratched and scribbled to blackness without much care for finesse, the great reduction and the tint being reckoned upon to assuage all angularities. The original drawing was then lightly scribbled over with blue pencil to indicate to the process-man that a mechanical tint was required to be applied upon the block, and word was specially sent that the tint was to be squarely cut, not vignetted. The result seems happy. This is a line block, not tone.

In such a case the procedure is normal until the image is printed upon the sensitized ground of the zinc plate. Then the prescribed tint is transferred by pressure of thumb and fingers, or by means of a burnisher, from an engraved sheet of gelatine previously inked with a printing roller. The zinc plate is then etched in the familiar way.