Instant Lithography for the Artist-Printmaker

In comparison to other methods of producing original prints, the attraction of lithography to an artist is in its closeness to the spontaneous act of drawing on paper. The direct use of greasy crayon, ink and wash techniques is a natural extension. I should like to report on my experiments using Direct Image (D.I.) plates, an improved plastic fibre-coated paper plate (trade name, Polychrome Quality Di-Kote) the advantages and possibilities of which do not appear, as yet, to have been pursued widely by artist-printmakers. These plates are manufactured by the Polychrome Corporation, Yonkers, New York, U.S.A. Traditionally, the procedure followed in schools and recommended in handbooks on lithography is based on the original discovery that a grained limestone will retain a greasy image. This still dictates to the purists the use of a scraper type hand press (as opposed to the cylinder type) plus the use of heavy leather rollers. All in all a laborious process, often discouraging to the beginner (especially to women) and more so as prints grow in size. The development in commercial offset lithography of the metal plate and subsequent use by artists removed much of the physical strain but increased the cost of materials and still required a lengthy and involved method to stabilize the greasy image on the plate. Previously, I had read of but never used a paper plate, as all references in handbooks seemed to consider it as an inferior image base, suitable only for a limited number of proofs (as well it may have been at that time). It was only fairly recently, when I became interested in using the photographic image and searched for a more reliable and cheaper method for transferring newspaper collages to a metal plate, I discovered that the D.I. plate could be used for this purpose. Subsequently, I began to consider its other possibilities and advantages. Used mainly by small commercial offset printing firms for typed pamphlets, brochures, etc. (the plate can be prepared easily on an ordinary office typewriter, requiring no darkroom or photographic equipment), it can also be used for hand work as well as on modern photo-copying machines. A Di-Kote plate to which a spray technique for tonal gradations has been applied is shown in Fig. 1 and a print made from a plate in Fig. 2. Tests and editions of prints that I made over a