The Building of a Book Part 9

The technical equipment of the artist must twist into realistic semblance, clear to the eye, the imaginary product of the author. He must not add to it nor take away from it--even for the sake of beauty in his picture--one iota of the facts given him. His imagination, grasping all the ideas of the author, must a.s.semble them and find a place for each one, good, bad, and indifferent, and present them to the reader in a form that will command his approval.

The artist cannot tease the mind with the vague influence of description, as can the author, nor can he veil his products with the pleasing glamour of unreality. Without haze his work stands forth, bold facts in half-tone reproduction and printer's ink, fighting an uncertain fight at best with the imagination of the reader.

People will have ill.u.s.trations, though. If the pictures do not literally fill the bill, they nevertheless please. Something definite, carrying a story idea, is always acceptable.

Something which excites the imagination invariably challenges interest, and the ill.u.s.trator who is true to his calling and above s.h.i.+rking his task enhances the interesting features of a book a thousand fold, if he spares no pains in arriving at an actual expression of the author's intention.

The knowledge that an ill.u.s.trator brings to his work should be as broad and varied as human history. Above and beyond his ability to draw or execute in a manner technically pleasing, should stand his knowledge of people, places, and events. It should include all Things, Ologies, and Isms. A living Index he must be, knowing just enough to readily discover more, and with this knowledge he must make others feel and imagine.

If the author would tell of wars, Trojan, Egyptian, or Siamese, the ill.u.s.trator must follow him and be truthful. He must know enough of Troy, Egypt, or Siam to make clear to the reader the face, form, and clothes of the characters, their weapons of bloodshed, their way of killing, how they marched to do it and through what manner of country.

He must know or find out all these things, and within all his pictures must carry the spirit of terror and murder that stalked at the time, so carefully expressed that the terror and murder will be of that particular epoch and no other. All this must be shown as clearly as that the characters belong to their helmets or s.h.i.+elds, their war chariots or bamboo lances. Simple the task may seem in these days of public libraries and ready reference, yet it is a most nerve-racking business, this placing an embossed helm or set of greaves on the hero of a story, so that he may stand out a Roman, and when the labor is finished having him stare genially out at you, insistently proclaiming the masquerade, and seemingly proud of his resemblance to a St. Louis b.u.t.ton salesman.

When all is said and done the ill.u.s.trator's strongest a.s.set is spirit.

Technique and a grain of insight will help a man over many a rut in portraiture, and a knowledge of patting clay and using a chisel has saved many a sculptor, but technical equipment alone never made an ill.u.s.trator, because he deals too directly with life in action. Slack drawing and impatience of method will always be pardoned in an ill.u.s.trator, if his picture convinces.

Let a writer tell of a pair in love and the ill.u.s.trator pictures their kiss; if he convinces the reader that the kiss is in earnest, the drawing may be full of faults, but the point is made and nothing more is asked, save that "she" be pretty and "he" manly. Consider the difficulty of this trick of convincing, when the words of love carefully weighed and prepared by the author and set into the atmosphere of a scene equally well prepared will often occasion derisive smiles. So it may be explained that the purpose of ill.u.s.tration is to carry the spirit of action rather than to serve as a basis for deft expression of technical skill, and ill.u.s.tration will reach its highest development along the lines which give it an excuse for its existence.

The mechanical processes for the reproduction of ill.u.s.trations have served to develop various methods of drawing the original picture. The half-tone screen in connection with photography has made possible an almost exact copy of the artist's work, and at very small cost.

Formerly an ill.u.s.tration was drawn on a wood block and turned over to a wood engraver, who laboriously cut it into the block and as he cut away the drawing as he worked it was impossible to compare his reproduction with the original. It can be readily seen that only a very good engraver was to be trusted to reproduce anything of value, and as there were never very many engravers of the first cla.s.s, artists' work usually suffered. Half-tone engraving reproduces a drawing by photography and necessarily shows much of the individual method of the artist. Zinc etching of pen-and-ink drawings is even more exact in its results. Lately, methods of reproducing colored originals and paintings have been brought forward, and the results are surprisingly good. Scientific photography is at the bottom of this, and the old method of lithography, which demanded ten or twelve printings in reproduction, and then fell short, seems to have seen the last day on which it will break the heart of the artist.

Because of the sun and the dry plate, ill.u.s.trators had to find inks and methods which would aid the engraver as much as possible. The use of opaque white as a ground for the mixture of tones, with its resultant bluish cast in black-and-white drawing, has almost disappeared. The camera will not find gradations in blue and artists have found it better to use pure india ink washed out in water, allowing the white of the paper to serve for high lights. Of course, opaque has its uses, but it is only after much experience and many disappointments that an artist can learn just where to use it and how.

Pen-and-ink drawings and crayon drawings on rough paper in which the crayon is applied direct, and not rubbed, will always please the engraver most and return the best reproductions; but in this case cleverness and technique demand the greater notice from the artist if he would have the result interesting. A successful pen drawing is an achievement almost equal to an etching and it is unfortunate, considering the ease with which it may be successfully engraved, that good pen drawing is so rare.

Black-and-white oil offers an inviting field to the ill.u.s.trator who aims at a sense of completeness in his work. Honestly handled, there is no other method of working that can convey an equal feeling of solidity and earnestness. By its use an artist can suggest all the qualities of a full-color painting and impress one with the last-forever look that thought and study gives to earnest work.

Most drawings for reproduction are worked in wash--why, it is hard to say. Oil will s.h.i.+ne and reflect lights, and the engraver has this to overcome; but, barring the lightness and appearance of ease that wash suggests, there is no very apparent difference in the reproductions, and oil has the advantage of greater simplicity in detail.

For deftness and brilliancy ill.u.s.trations finished in crayon rubbed into tones easily surpa.s.s those done by other methods, but the process has the disadvantage of appearing thin in the reproduction, unless the plate is very carefully tooled and printed.

When the ill.u.s.trator has chosen his subject and decided on the method of treatment that will best serve the demands of the story to be pictured, fully half his labor is completed.

The preliminary sketches necessary to the condensing of his ideas open the door to the real pleasure in his work--standing up a model and creating therefrom a character is pure joy, and it is for this alone that the ill.u.s.trator toils through the dry dust of reference libraries and costume shops.

Models are either a great aid or a great drawback in the picturing of characters, for while they a.s.sist the artist by simplifying the labor of drawing, they often handicap him by intruding their own personality into the work, thereby spoiling the sense of character aimed at. When an ill.u.s.trator allows this to happen, it does not matter how beautiful or accurate his sketch may be, he fails in the first essential of his craft, entering forthwith into the field occupied by painters and decorators, who can do the same thing very much better. So, while the model is often a necessary appendage to the construction of a character, it is imperative that the spirit and sense spring from the artist, whose business is, not to reproduce the model, but to use it sparingly as he would a book of reference.

The ill.u.s.trator finds that the speech an author puts into the mouths of his characters is the best index to their personality. They may be described as tall or short, dark or light, stout or thin, and their creator may explain their capacities for love, hate, villany, or dissipation, but it is only the words with which they express their ideas that really describes them. His description of the beauty of a girl will not be accepted on trust. He must supply her with deportment and breeding before her beauty can be truly imagined. Thus it may be explained that the measure of an author's conception and clearness often determines the qualities in an ill.u.s.tration. The true ill.u.s.trator is sensitive to faults in the delineation of character, and, although he may not be aware of it, his work will show it. Of course it often happens that an artist is taken up with ideas of technique and, author or no author, will make his pictures in just such a way; but such work is hardly ill.u.s.tration and serves itself better standing alone.

And thus it goes throughout the scene to be pictured--place, time, and people, all must be imagined twice and equally clear, by both the author and the ill.u.s.trator, before the reader will agree.

To the ill.u.s.trator, hampered by given quant.i.ties, falls the most difficult task in this duet of imagination, and he can at best hope only for the reader's approval, as all credit for conception goes to the author. It is on this approval, though, that he builds, for if he succeeds in making things clearer to the reader's imagination, he has accomplished what he set out to do and has proved himself worth his hire.

So the aims of ill.u.s.tration are set forth, but whether the laborer completes his work well or ill, whether he brings great ability or only honest intention to its accomplishment, he is engaged in a business as fascinating as it is uncertain. Failure only drives him to another try, and success is always just around the corner. The ill.u.s.trator who would live by his work must live with it. If he has a thought in his mind that does not deal in some form with ill.u.s.trations and half-tone plates, he is wasting that thought and his time besides.

HALF-TONE, LINE, AND COLOR PLATES

By Emlyn M. Gill.

Practically all book ill.u.s.trations, as well as those in catalogues and periodicals of all kinds, are made by some method of photo-engraving.

Wood engraving is almost a thing of the past, and many who are in a position to know predict that after the present generation of wood engravers has pa.s.sed out of existence, artistic wood engraving will be a lost art. It is certain that there is now no younger school of wood engravers growing up to take the place of the engravers whose work in the leading magazines, up to a few years ago, made them famous.

The quickly made and comparatively inexpensive process plates have not only taken the place of wood engraving, but have increased the field of ill.u.s.tration to a very large extent. They have made possible hundreds and even thousands of publications which could not have existed in the old days of expensive wood engraving. The use of photo-engraved plates has increased enormously each year during the past twenty years, and with this increased use has come the inevitable decrease in cost, so that ill.u.s.trations are no longer much of a luxury to the publisher.

Photography is the basis of all the mechanical processes that come under the general head of photo-engraving. These processes are generally called mechanical, yet, as in photography, great skill is required to produce the best results. The higher grades of half-tone work require much careful finis.h.i.+ng, which is all done by hand, and which, moreover, must be done by a skilful, intelligent, and artistic engraver. Practically all things may be reproduced successfully by photo-engraving, but the vast majority of subjects that go to the photo-engraver are either photographs or drawings.

All methods of relief plate photo-engraving come under two general heads: "Half-tone" and "line engraving," the latter being very generally known as "zinc etching." Zinc etching is the simplest method of photo-engraving and should be thoroughly understood before one begins to inquire into the intricacies of the half-tone process. It is used to reproduce what is known as "black and white" work, or line drawings. Any drawing or print having black lines or dots on a white background, without any middle shades, may be engraved by this process. The old-fas.h.i.+oned "wet-plate" photography is used in making practically all process plates, either in line or half-tone.

I will describe briefly all the operations gone through in making a line plate, taking for a subject a map drawn in black ink on white paper or a head drawn by Charles Dana Gibson,--subjects wide apart in an artistic way, but of absolutely equal values so far as making the plate is concerned. The drawing is first put on a copy board in front of a camera made especially for this work, in whose holder the wet plate has already been placed by the operator. The subject may be enlarged or reduced to any desired size, nearly all drawings being made much larger than they are desired to be reproduced in the plates.

The exposure is much longer than in ordinary dry plate work, generally lasting in the neighborhood of five minutes. The result is a black and white negative. That is, the lines that were black in the drawing are absolutely clear and transparent in the negative, but the rest of the negative is black. From the photographer, the negative goes to the "negative-turning" room. Here the negative is coated with solutions of collodion and rubber cement, which makes the film exceedingly tough--so tough that it is easily stripped from the gla.s.s on which it was made, and is "turned" with the positive side up on another sheet of gla.s.s. If this were not done, the plate would be reversed in printing--that is, a line of type would read from right to left, or backward. After the negative is "turned," it is ready for the etching room. Here the surface of a sheet of zinc about one-sixteenth of an inch thick, which has been polished until it is as smooth as plate gla.s.s and without a scratch or a flaw of any kind, is flowed with a sensitized solution, easily affected by light. The negative is placed in a printing frame over the sensitized zinc and a print is made. That is, it is exposed to the sunlight or to a powerful electric light, and the light s.h.i.+nes through the transparent parts of the negative, and hardens the sensitized surface; while the black part of the negative protects the sensitized surface from the action of the light. The plate is next "rolled up" with a lithograph roller which distributes a thin coating of etching ink over the entire surface. The plate is then washed off carefully by the operator, but the ink adheres to all portions of the plate that have been acted upon by the light. We now have a fully developed print on the highly polished surface of the zinc that is an exact reproduction of the original drawing. It is now necessary to make this print acid proof, and this is done by covering the plate with a coating of very fine resinous powder, called "dragon's blood," which adheres to the printed portions of the plate.

The plate is subjected to enough heat to melt this powder, and is then ready for the acid bath.

A strong solution of nitric acid is used for etching zinc plates. This acid is placed in trays, which are rocked constantly, either by power or by hand, while the plate is being etched. The melted dragon's blood makes a perfect acid resistant and the acid, therefore, does not affect the print (or picture itself), but eats away the bare surfaces of the metal between the black lines and the dots. When this etching has proceeded far enough to make a plate that may be used in printing, the lines and dots of the picture stand up in bold relief, while the metal around these lines and dots has been eaten away to a considerable depth.

There are many details that cannot be described in a short article, but these are the princ.i.p.al operations gone through in etching the plate. One very important detail in etching is to prevent "undercutting." It is obvious that if the acid will eat down, it will also eat sidewise. The acid resistant is only on the surface. If means were not taken to prevent it, as soon as the acid got below the surface, it would begin to eat in under the print and the lines and dots of the picture would disappear; therefore, as soon as the plate has had its first "bite," it is taken from the acid, dried, and dragon's blood is brushed against the sides of the lines. This powder is then melted and the plate given another etching. While the plate is being etched down, it is removed from the acid several times, and the sides of the dots and lines are again protected. After leaving the etching room the plate goes to the "router," an ingenious machine, with a cutting tool revolving at a speed of fourteen thousand revolutions a minute, which quickly removes the waste metal in the large open places between the lines and dots. The zinc plates are carefully looked over by a finisher, defects are removed, and the metal plates are then nailed on wooden blocks, so that they will be "type-high," that is, of exactly the same height as the metal type-forms used in printing. Hand presses are a necessity in all photo-engraving shops, and with these several "proofs" of each plate are printed in order that the customer may judge of the quality of the plate.

While the line, or zinc etching process is immensely useful, in reproducing pen-and-ink drawings, maps, wood-cut prints, etc., yet the half-tone process is the one that practically revolutionized all known methods of ill.u.s.tration, after it had become perfected. While zinc etching is limited in its capabilities to the reproduction of black and white subjects, practically everything in art or nature may be reproduced by the half-tone process. The half-tone "screen" makes it possible to take a photograph or wash drawing and break the flat surface of the picture up into lines and dots, with the white s.p.a.ces between that are an absolute essential in relief plate printing. If a half-tone print taken from any magazine or periodical is examined closely, either with the naked eye or a magnifying gla.s.s, it will be seen that the entire picture is a perfect network of lines and dots, and that there are two sets of lines running diagonally across the plate at right angles to each other. In the darker portions of the picture it will be seen that the lines are very heavy, with a small white dot in the centre of each square, made by the intersecting lines. In the lighter portions of the picture, these lines will be found to be very fine, while in the lightest parts, or in the "high lights," as they are called, the lines disappear and in their places are a ma.s.s of fine dots, not much larger than a pin point.

To make a half-tone plate of a photograph or other subject, it is necessary to break the negative up into lines and dots. It is for this purpose that the half-tone "screen" is used. The screen consists of two thin pieces of plate-gla.s.s, on the surface of which a series of very delicate parallel black lines have been ruled running diagonally across the gla.s.s. When these pieces of gla.s.s are placed together, face to face, the parallel lines ruled on them intersect each other at right angles, giving a very fine "mosquito-netting" effect. The method of making the negative is very similar to that described in making line negatives, excepting that in making a half-tone negative the screen is placed in the plate-holder directly in front of the negative. The subject is then photographed, and the result is a negative completely covered with a ma.s.s of fine transparent lines and dots.

Copper is generally used instead of zinc in making half-tone plates.

In making a print on copper the light s.h.i.+nes through the transparent lines and dots of the negative and hardens the sensitized surface of the plate. The black parts of the negative between the transparent lines and dots protect the sensitized surface. When the plate, after printing, is placed under a water tap, the parts of the sensitized surface that have not been acted upon by light wash away, leaving a print that becomes acid proof after being subjected to an intense heat.

The method of etching a copper plate is similar to that already described for etching zinc plates, excepting that sesquichloride of iron is used instead of nitric acid. In a half-tone the dots and lines are so close together that great depth is neither desirable nor possible, and no steps are taken to prevent undercutting.

The half-tone plate, after it has been carried as far as possible by mechanical processes, is capable of great improvement in the hands of skilful engravers. The plate as it comes from the etching bath may be termed a mechanical product. Though great skill is necessary in making the negative, the print, and the etching, the hand-finis.h.i.+ng gives the plate many of its artistic qualities. The unfinished plate is apt to be more or less "flat" in appearance; the high lights may not be light enough, while the dark portions of the plate are apt, in cases, to be too light. The most common methods of finis.h.i.+ng are reetching and burnis.h.i.+ng. The finisher dips a camel's-hair brush in acid and applies it to the high-light portions of the plate, or other places that are too dark, and allows it to act on the metal until these parts of the plate are lightened sufficiently. The parts of the plate that are too light are made darker by rubbing down the surface of the plate with a tool called the burnisher. The skilful, artistic finisher has other methods at his command of making the plate reproduce as accurately and as artistically as possible the original drawing or photograph. High lights are sometimes cut out entirely, or a fine engraver's tool may be "run" between the lines; while a "wood-engraved" finish is produced by cutting, in certain portions of the plate, lines similar to those used in wood engraving.

In the price-cutting that has been going on as a result of the fierce compet.i.tion that has existed among photo-engravers during the past few years, the artistic possibilities of the half-tone have been lost sight of to a certain extent. The product of the engravers is sold by the square inch, regardless of the fact that the cost of one plate may be double the cost of another plate of the same size, but from a different subject.

A point also worth remembering is that until the plate reaches the finishers' hands, it has been more or less of a mechanical product; and that the plate is made an artistic creation by the skill, care, and brains of an intelligent cla.s.s of men earning from $25 to $50 a week. Those expecting "the best" at "the lowest price" can easily guess about how much of this high-priced finis.h.i.+ng they will get when the price paid barely covers the cost of the mechanical product. Then, engravers striving for high quality in the product pay from twenty-five to fifty per cent higher wages, as a rule, than the cheap, commercial shops. But the idea of square-inch price has so generally permeated the buying public, that the larger and better shops have been compelled, to a greater or less extent, to meet the prices of their less skilful compet.i.tors. They are enabled to do this and give their customers much greater value for their money, only through better business methods, more modern facilities, and by conducting the business on a very large scale.

The screens used in making half-tones represent an enormous outlay in the large shops. A comparatively small screen costs in the neighborhood of $100. A screen 18 20, ruled 120 or 133 lines to the inch, costs about $500. Screens are made with different numbers of lines to the inch, from 65, for coa.r.s.e, newspaper work, up to 400. The screens in general use are 65, 85, 100, 110, 120, 133, 150, 166, 175, and 200; but intermediate sizes are also used, such as 125 and 140. A screen containing 200 lines to the inch is about the finest ever used for ordinary printing purposes, though a few screens with 250, 300, and 400 lines to the inch have been made. A well-equipped photo-engraving establishment must have all these screens, and all of them in many different sizes. In the writer's shop there are fifteen cameras, all of them in constant use in the daytime and five or six of them are always in use all night. Some days the bulk of the work in the place will be a fine grade of magazine engraving calling for a 175 screen. In order to keep all the cameras at work all the time, a thing that is very important in a well-regulated place, it is necessary to have a number of 175 screens almost equal to the number of cameras.

The same is true of most of the other screens in general use.

Fortunately for the engraver and the consumer these screens practically last forever if carefully handled.

The greatest developments in process work during the past few years have been in the making of color plates. Beautiful results are obtained in two colors by the "duograph" or "duotone" processes, the plates being made for two printings. The three-color process aims to reproduce all colors in three printings, by using inks of red, yellow, and blue. This process is very interesting, but somewhat intricate.

Primarily, the results are made possible by color separations. The aim is to take a colored subject--an oil painting, for instance--and by photographing it three times, each time through a different colored piece of gla.s.s, to divide all the colors into what are called the three primary colors--red, yellow, and blue. From each of these color separations a half-tone plate is made, and when these plates are put on the printing-press, and the impressions are printed over each other in yellow, red, and blue inks, respectively, the result is a printed picture reproducing correctly all the colors of the original subject.

While many subjects may be reproduced accurately by this process, yet the three-color process seems inadequate to give perfectly satisfactory results in all cases. Nearly all three-color process houses are now prepared to add a fourth, or key, plate, to be printed in black, in case the subject seems to need it. The three-color process has enabled many of the leading magazines to use ill.u.s.trations in colors, and there is not the slightest doubt but that there is a great future for this cla.s.s of work.

THE WAX PROCESS

By Robert D. Servoss.