What are the six kinds of prints?

According to the plate-making method, prints are mainly divided into four types and five types. Four kinds refer to relief, intaglio, lithographic and perforated plates, and five kinds are comprehensive plates on them.

Letterpress is the most common type in printmaking. When a painter carves or erodes a flat wooden block or other metal surface, he removes the part that does not need to be printed, leaving the raised part to form a picture. The works made by ink and printing are called relief paintings, and the most typical ones are woodcuts. (as shown in figure 1) Gravure printing refers to carving deep concave lines on a flat metal surface with a steel knife to form grooves with different thicknesses, and then filling ink in the concave joints. After stamping with a copper plate printing machine, the ink sticks to the paper to form a picture, which is called metal engraving. For example, portrait patterns or engraved stamps on RMB. Metal plate includes copper plate, steel plate, aluminum plate, zinc plate, iron plate, etc. Copper plate is the most commonly used by artists, so gravure painting generally refers to copper plate prints.

Lithography does not rely on uneven layout, but on the principle of oil-water repulsion. Lithography is the predecessor of modern drum printing. In the past, notices and musicians were printed in lithographs. As manual printing is laborious, inefficient, and has large errors, as soon as metal photosensitive plate making appeared, drum printing (fast, economical, and beautiful color) replaced lithographic printing, and lithographic printing was gradually forgotten. However, the painter uses the combination of plane lithograph printing technology and painting performance to create beautiful lithographs. (Figure 2) Porous plate is also called bushing. Generally, it refers to water or oily pigment, which is scraped on paper from bottom to top through silk, polyester, nylon, silk and other materials by using a scraper. In the past, the main material of printing plate was screen printing, so it was called screen printing. Now the commonly used term is screen printing. Of course, later nylon and polyester were also used to print printed matter. In China, screen printing is a new kind of painting, and it only takes about 20 years from its emergence to its prosperity.

Comprehensive printmaking is the product of overprint of two or more combinations of convex, concave, flat and controlled formats. A comprehensive version usually takes one page as the main version, others as sub-versions, and some parts only use some special texture effects.