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AS ALREADY stated, the principle of printing by the repulsion of oil and water, which was Senefelder’s invention and which has been called “lithography,” has been found applicable to so many other substances than stone—zinc, aluminum, glass, rubber, iron, etc.—that a wider name is needed for the work done by this method. “Planography,” of which lithography is one division, has been introduced. Planography prints neither from a raised surface nor from an incised surface, but from a flat surface whose diversities are purely chemical. A part of this surface, by being treated in a certain way, is made to accept water and refuse grease; the remaining part, treated in a different way, reverses this action, refusing water while accepting grease. These chemical preparations enable the printer, after wetting his surface, to make the ink stick to certain parts without sticking to other parts. This done, a print is got by pressing paper against it. This was Senefelder’s invention.

Among all the substances available in planographic printing, stone has from the beginning always held the chief place. It holds it still wherever the first question is the quality of the work. Zinc is sometimes substituted as more convenient; but the work on it is not so good as that on stone, and Mr. Thomas R. Way correctly characterizes it as “lacking the refinement of stone work.”

THE STONE

For crayon work the cleanest and most evenly colored stones of extreme hardness are to be selected.

—SENEFELDER

Lithographic stone is of a grayish color with a grain like petrified clay. Fossil shells and other organic remains often occur in it. In chemical composition it is about 97 per cent carbonate of lime.

Various regions of the world yield stones of this character, but as yet it is only from the original quarries at Solenhofen, in Bavaria, that we get those very superior kinds which our art requires. Two chief varieties are recognized, yellow and gray. The yellow ones are softer than the gray. The latter class is sometimes again divided, the name “blue” being given to the coldest-colored, hardest, and most brittle sorts. For artistic crayon work, blue and gray stones, especially the latter, are preferred. The yellow ones are more easily injured in etching and will not yield so sharp a print.

The stones are grubbed from deep quarry pits in damp slabs of various thicknesses and qualities. Of all that the quarry yields, only some 2 or 3 per cent are sufficiently perfect to be of use to us. The expert overseer picks out the good slabs, marking their grades, those of the best grade being subsequently planed on both sides and marketed at an extra price as double-faced stones.

Some stones show a peppering of red points (iron), and others are marred by the presence of fossils. Still others show broad color bands that are visually undesirable for the draftsman and that contain in some cases a very remote possibility of injuriously affecting the print. Once or twice I have had bars appear in the print corresponding to color bars in the stone. Other stones have seams of what is called “glass.” So long as these are closed, as they usually are, most kinds of work may safely ignore them. If they are “open,” i.e., if they absorb water and give it out again in a wet line when the surrounding surface is dry, then they are dangerous. The best stones not only are fairly free from defects but show a fracture of peculiar smoothness and evenness.

Since the scraper of the press brings great pressure along a mere line, if the stones were not rather thick the pressure would break them. According to the area of its surface, a stone may have a thickness of from 1 1/2 to 5 or 6 inches. A stone having 300 or 400 square inches of surface—that is to say, one measuring about 18 by 20 inches—may weigh from 50 to 100 pounds. Selected second-hand stones are in no way inferior to new ones. When a stone has worn too thin to withstand the pressure of the scraper, it may be used as a mixing-table for the ink. Or it may be kept in use by reducing its size. If it is rather large and you elect not to trim it down but to cut it in two, this is readily done; or at any rate I do it, as follows: I support the stone on an edge which, on the under side of the stone, follows the line where the break is wanted. Directly above, on the upper side of the stone, I rule a line. A small chisel is set upright on this line and smartly hit with a light hammer. Sliding the chisel along after each blow, I hit again, clear across. If it remains firm, I repeat, listening carefully. Shortly I hear the clear ring of the stone give place to a dull sound, and know an effective crack is dividing it. A delicate tap causes it to drop apart.

The fractured surface is beautiful. It is almost as smooth as flint, so fine are its component grains. It is not hard, it is brittle and tense, and rings when struck. Since the natural rock has no appreciable texture of its own, we have the opportunity to create upon it by artificial means whatever texture exactly suits our needs.

CRAYONSTONE

DRAWING ON STONE AS A FINE ART

The range of every art corresponds to the physical nature of the substances used. Commonplace as this statement assuredly is, many writers, talkers, philosophers, and aesthetes still do not grasp either its truth or its importance; and naturally, for without sense-familiarity with the substances and processes of an art it is not possible that they should read the minds of the artists whose language these constitute. Pindar said: “To the cunning workman true knowledge comes, undeceitful.”

When crayonstone drawing was brought into the world, able artists (1820–60) saw and used it. Being workmen, they sensed the nature of the materials they saw and felt and spoke through. The outstanding character of the crayonstone mark is its granularity, coarse or fine as the stone is. It is peculiarly responsive to pressure. It responds in two ways: by darkening the area pressed upon, and also by increasing its size.

The surface of the stone is made of minute hills and valleys, lying in a plain. The crayon scrapes itself off against the tops of the hills. With light pressure, only the summits get covered, the interspaces remaining relatively wide. The tint thus composed has great fineness, paleness, and openness. Pressure on the crayon increases the size of these grains, adding at the same time many new and minute ones on the summits of those hills that are smaller. The tint is now darker and somewhat coarser. Ultimately, with pressure enough, all the hills and even the bottoms of the valleys are charged with crayon. The tint now is flat black with no texture at all.

As the tone gets darker and coarser, it still retains some refinement, some bloom. This depends upon very small grains of dark among the large ones and upon the presence of very small interstices of light everywhere.

Such is the lithographic tone, a clean sparkling interplay among particles of white and black. In white paper it does not exist; in flat black it does not. In all the gradations between these, it does.

This is the way it is on the stone. It is the business of the printing to present it thus in the print. If the printing does not do this, it is not good printing. If the etching eats away some of the small granules, the texture is coarsened, the tone is changed in value, the design is injured. If the inking is so handled as to fill up some of the small granules of light, the texture is coarsened, the values changed, the work injured.

Remembering that the hills, valleys, and grains just spoken of may be on any scale of size, according to the size of the grains of the abrasive material used in surfacing the stone, we see that the pictorial range of crayon-stone is practically boundless. Mouilleron reproduced Delacroix’s painting so well that this painter thought the print had qualities he hardly remembered putting into the painting. If lithography can do this from a painting, it can do it without any painting. Artists are not limited to mere sketches: they can elaborate as fully as they choose, and the stone will justify them.

In the history of the art, almost every sort of subject and style of treatment has sometime been essayed. Lions, as large as real ones, on billboards, and gnats, as small as real ones, on drawings of fruit, have been successfully dealt with. Portraiture has been done in every conceivable manner; and if the figure has been presented less often, this is not from any shortcoming in the art.

As to contemporary crayonstone work, its most usual fault grows out of our habits acquired with other materials. We are too much suckled on types of drawings done in thousands, adapted to the transient needs of advertising and illustrating.

The independent artist-lithographer should get all these other ideas out of his system: he should operate as purely in his own medium as do the etcher and the painter. Crayonstone happily enables him to lay aside haste, worry about editors, going to press, or the restrictions of any reproductive process. If he is brilliant, the stone will scintillate with him. If he is thoughtful, it will graciously encourage his most beautiful dream. If it is in him to make a real work of art, let him make it. Never will a better opportunity knock at his door than when holding a perfect crayon, he faces a perfect stone.

And yet, no one can do either himself or his medium justice the first time he tries, or the second. Interesting, even valuable things, if you will; but man may not be master anywhere without paying the price. And the price here is the loving labor necessary to bring about that intimate familiarity without which there is no master, only an experimenter.

EDGE OF THE WOODS

Size: 14 × 10 inches.

Serial number of gone: 248.

Stone grained with carborundum, Grade F.

Crayon number: 300; made thus:

Stearine	820 grains
White wax	230 grains
Carnauba wax	230 grains
Babbitt’s Concentrated Lye (saturated solution).	120 drops

Notes made at the time say: “The day was very warm but the crayon worked perfectly and the stone did not spread. Rolled up on the crayon.”

Etch not given; probably about 1–48.

Moreover, so intimate is the whole series of acts by which the design is translated from something drawn into something printed that really the artist should perform all of them himself. Ernest Jackson said to me, “Tell the fellows, in season and out of season, that they must do their own printing.” In the mind of him who does this, creative imagination, including in its vision the exact steps necessary to turn his drawing into a print, presents to consciousness only ideas capable of being externalized in this way. Briefly, it enables him, as nothing else can, to do his imagining in terms of his finished work of art—his print.

Some people are forever proclaiming easy ways, shortcuts, and substitutes. As they tell it, royal roads turn off at every corner. They are wrong. There is no royal road to anywhere worth getting to, nor any substitute for a unique thing.

GRINDING A TEXTURE ON THE STONE

A stone with the proper grain is the first requisite for successful chalk drawing.

—HULLMANDEL

We have, however, more to think about, under the general head of “grinding,” than merely texture. Often there is old work to be got off, and always we have to keep the top and bottom parallel. Calipers are used to test this in the shops, but I have easily got along without them. When I start to print, the press itself quickly tells me if the stone is unequal. If one end binds, I compensate by blocking up the other with paper under it—torn of unequal widths and laid to form a slope. Later, when I next grind the stone, I merely put a little extra work on the thick end.

For testing the truth of the plane surface of the stone, a rigid steel straightedge is used, though after some practice one gets along mostly without it. Having got the habit, I now grind a stone true unconsciously. At first I used to test by laying down a hair on the stone, setting the steel on it, and if at any point the hair was not held by the steel, the stone was hollow there and grinding continued. A bit of paper may replace the hair.

Originally sand was the thing used to grind with, but now other substances are also in use—ground flint, ground glass, emery powder and carborundum, among them.

The abrasive is put upon the stone with water and rubbed either with a second stone or with an iron shaped like a grindstone and called a “levigator” or “jigger.” Commercially, stones are commonly surfaced by machinery. A stone may be ground wet or dry. The latter is unusual. If adopted, the surface must be cleaned dry, with brushes and coarse cloths that remove every particle of grinding dust. Senefelder advises soap in the grinding water,—a very bad thing and liable to cause the stone to roll up smutty or grow soiled in the course of printing. A little sugar in the water helps keep the abrasive in an even layer. If a polish is wanted (though you cannot use crayon properly on a polished stone), it is got usually by pumice and Water-of-Ayr stone. This latter stone is known in the American market as “Scotch hones” when in flat slabs and as “snake slips” (“snake” is short for “snake stone”) when in pencil-like prisms. It is a lovely, soft, fine-grained material found on the river Ayr, in Scotland.

Before stone grinding can be carried on in a civilized way, arrangements must be made to catch the slop. A tight box or tank of sufficient size with a couple of pieces of wood—say 2 by 4 inches—laid across the top to put the stone on, really furnishes the main essentials.

A common kitchen article, a sheet-iron roasting pan, has on occasions held a stone for grinding.

When your stand is established, put the stone on, wet it, and mix into water a spoonful or so of abrasive—more if you are using sand than if you are using something harsher. Set the levigator down upon it. Do it care-ally, because the slightest bumping of the heavy iron may crack off minute unnoticed chips liable to plow frightful scratches into the stone. Experience will show you how to spin the levigator about, neither too fast nor too slow; how to add water; when to clear off the old sludge, thick and mucky from ground-up stone; and when to stop. Sand cuts down a stone more slowly than flint, and the latter not so fast as carborundum. Carborundum costs seven times as much as sand and cuts twenty-six times as fast. The coarser the abrasive, the harder the work and the faster the cutting. It is seldom worth while to cut with a sand coarser than will pass a 60-mesh sieve, or a carborundum coarser than number 100. When the old work has been thoroughly removed, put on finer powder—whatever you want, according to your intended drawing. When sand is used, its grains become round and worn down, in which state they yield a flat, poor surface. Toward the end, therefore, put on fresh sand and stop before it loses its tooth.

Delicate variations may be obtained by mixing different sorts of abrasives, by using grinders of different sizes, by substituting a second lithographic stone in place of the levigator (a very usual practice), by the amount of water present, by the amount of muck allowed to accumulate, and even by the variety of the speeds used. When a second stone takes the place of the levigator, a tendency toward convexity must be guarded against in the lower stone. By means of small grinders different parts of the same surface may be given different textures, each suited to that part of the design which it is to receive.

When the grinding is finished, flush the surface very thoroughly with great quantities of clean water. Then set the stone on edge in a clean place to drain and dry. Keep your hands off the surface; also, protect it from dust.

In grinding off old work from a stone, very rich drawings that have carried a deal of ink will need more prolonged grinding than delicate ones. Also, work which has remained weeks or months upon the stone will require to be ground more severely than recent work. In using carborundum, I generally get the necessary results by one grinding of No. 150, followed, in order, with one grinding of each of the successively finer grades, 180, 220, F, FF, stopping at that grade which suits my intended drawing.

Do not let the appearance of old work, after some grinding, unduly intimidate you. It will, or may, show as a pronounced light pattern. If insufficiently ground, this pattern may, as you print, begin to take the ink. Yet it is not always necessary to grind it totally out of existence. I have ground and printed an edition from a stone showing such a pattern of old work, without any harm from it at all.

Avoid grinding in a stiff muck of pulverized stone. Clean off and start anew before you reach this stiff stage. Don’t use too much water just at first: it washes the abrasive off the stone. Don’t use too little water at any time. As the water-film between stones grows thin, there comes a point where a suction action sets in, the stones being squeezed together by atmospheric pressure. Normal textures do not result if such conditions prevail.

I have forgotten to mention the rounding and polishing of the stone’s edges. This is done with powerful rasps, followed by finer ones, finished with a polish got by Water-of-Ayr stone. The purpose of these rounded edges is to prevent chipping, keep paper from creasing, and, much more than all others combined, to keep the ink from sticking to them. Angulak or rough edges insist upon getting inky.

Do not allow anyone to make you believe these technical things are impracticable—they are not. As to time, I can surface an ordinary stone and have it ready to draw on in 15 minutes, not longer than is required to stretch a sheet of water-color paper.