Making of a poster: Lithography

It's been a while since we started our journey across poster creation and printing methods - after letterpress printing and poster stories it's time for another printing technique, lithography, which was often used by poster makers from the past. The name comes from Ancient Greek; Lithos means "stone" and graphein - "to write". The print is, in fact, placed on a stone with a smooth surface, which is a basis for this type of print. It was invented in early XIXth century and for that time it was a main method of commercial color printing until it was replaced by offset lithography - says Kate Desforges, visual artist and printmaker working on a stone lithography print at the Leicester Print Workshop. - It’s a very intuitive process. (…) I think that the intuitive part of it challenges me and I like that. (...) In any other printmaking technique is a certain physical boundary between the image and the artist's mind and the reproduction of this image on the matrix in front of them. In lithography there is no intermedium, there is brain, hand, stone.

You can listen to this story and see the whole process here: