Color printing or colour printing is the reproduction of an image or text in color (as opposed to simpler black and white or monochrome printing).
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👉 Colour printing in the context of Book illustration
The illustration of manuscript books was well established in ancient times, and the tradition of the illuminated manuscript thrived in the West until the invention of printing. Other parts of the world had comparable traditions, such as the Persian miniature. Modern book illustration comes from the 15th-century woodcut illustrations that were fairly rapidly included in early printed books, and later block books. Other techniques such as engraving, etching, lithography and various kinds of colour printing were to expand the possibilities and were exploited by such masters as Daumier, Doré or Gavarni.
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Colour printing in the context of Aquatint
Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching that produces areas of tone rather than lines. For this reason it has mostly been used in conjunction with etching, to give both lines and shaded tone. It has also been used historically to print in colour, both by printing with multiple plates in different colours, and by making monochrome prints that were then hand-coloured with watercolour. The term colour etching, frequently used in the art trade, is potentially ambiguous, but most often means one of these two options.
It has been in regular use since the later 18th century, and was most widely used between about 1770 and 1830, when it was used both for artistic prints and decorative ones. After about 1830 it lost ground to lithography and other techniques. There have been periodic revivals among artists since then. An aquatint plate wears out relatively quickly, and is less easily reworked than other intaglio plates. Many of Goya's plates were reprinted too often posthumously, giving very poor impressions.
Colour printing in the context of Chromolithography
Chromolithography is a method for making multi-colour prints in lithography, and in theory includes all types of lithography that are printed in colour. However, in modern usage it is normally restricted to 19th-century works, and the higher quality examples from that period; almost all 21st-century colour printing uses lithography, but would not be described using the term chromolithography. When chromolithography is used to reproduce photographs, the term photochrome is frequently used. Lithography is a method of printing on flat surfaces using a flat printing plate instead of raised relief or recessed intaglio techniques.
Chromolithography became the most successful of several methods of colour printing developed in the 19th century. Other methods were developed by printers such as Jacob Christoph Le Blon, George Baxter and Edmund Evans, and mostly relied on using several woodblocks with different colours. Hand-colouring also remained important. For example, elements of the official British Ordnance Survey maps were coloured by hand by boys until 1875. The initial chromolithographic technique involved the use of multiple lithographic stones, one for each colour, and was still extremely expensive when done for the best quality results. Depending on the number of colours present, a chromolithograph could take even very skilled workers months to produce.
Colour printing in the context of Baxter process
George Baxter (1804–1867) was an English artist and printer based in London. He is credited with the invention of commercially viable colour printing.
Though colour printing had been developed in China centuries before, it was not commercially viable. However, in early years of the 19th century the process of colour printing had been revived by George Savage, a Yorkshireman in London. It was to be Savage's methods upon which Baxter, already an accomplished artist and engraver, was to improve. In 1828, Baxter began experimenting with colour printing by means of woodblocks.