Customer Reviews

How Prints Look: Photographs With A Commentary

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This is one of the most useful references available for learning the differences between various printmaking techniques. I have used the book myself and assigned it to museum graduate students since it was first published, as a practical compendium of most methods for graphic reproduction. The illustrations are not always crystal-clear, but each is well explained and makes a point about the method being explored. The many photographs of prints are well chosen to clarify the many differences and similarities of print techniqes.

Supposed you've decided that you really like fine prints - etchings, engravings, and all the rest - and you want to know a little about what you're looking at. This should be the first book you buy.

It gives a detailed look at the specific marks that characterize each technique for printmaking. It shows, in microscopic detail, the traces of the printmaker's tools. It also readies the reader for the idea that printmakers can and often do use multiple different techniques in preparing a plate.

I just wish there were slightly more of this outstanding material. The printing is black and white, because of the economics of book printing when this first came out. That does real disservice to the various color processes. The verbal description of color is good, but doesn't stand by itself. Its discussion of lithography could go into more detail about the marks from the stone itself, ditto side-grain vs. end-grain blocks for woodcut and wood engraving. It gives very good examples of some drypoint marks, but doesn't describe the sign that I consider most diagnostic. That's the asymmetric line, hard on one side and soft on the other, caused by the asymmetric drypoint burr. In other words, I just wish there were more of the book's outstanding content.

This isn't about process, much, just about the result of each process. That's fine. Once a novice print-lover learns which marks are the most personally intriguing, I assume [s]he'll find more from other sources. This is just an introduction, and a lovely one.

(...)

How Prints Look was written by a former curator of prints of the Metropolitan Museum of Arts and it shows; the author's commentary betrays great knowledge of print making techniques and of the prints themselves. Each chapter is devoted to one type of print making process for example there is a chapter devoted to woodcuts. I found the descriptions of the process used by the artists to be very interesting. However, it is the photographs, many of them closeups of the original prints, that are the selling point of this book. The artists who made these prints, some of which are centuries old while others were made at the turn of the Twentieth Century, clearly knew what they were doing. There is a clear attention to detail which does not get in the way of the overall sense of the composition of the art work. In other words the artists were able to delve into detail without losing the overall focus of the work. They were able, by varying the thickness of lines, to simulate shading and, indeed, they were able to do anything a person could do with pen on paper. I imagine that the slow painstaking process involved in the creation of this art must have allowed, and indeed required, the artist to be very deliberate in his or her actions. I personally feel that this must have contributed to the quality of the resulting work. I recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn to appreciate the art of print making whether they be artists themselves or not.