Pigmentography

Pigmentography is a stencil printing technique developed by the artist Al Bernstein in the 1970s . Bernstein initially referred to the technique as trace print , but from 1980 onwards as pigmentography.

technology

The motif is drawn or painted on a carrier stencil, which can also be referred to as carrier film. Then the printing forms, the color separations of the motif, are cut and engraved using the positive-negative process. During the printing process itself, the color and color pigments are brushed by hand through the printing stencil and then fixed .

There is practically no limit to the print format, number of colors or prints. Compared to industrial screen printing and artistic screen printing, so-called serigraphy , pigmentography cannot be automated. It remains a pure hand print with shapes made by hand, a polyautography .

Strictly speaking, pigmentography stands between polyautography and monotype . Although it is possible to produce a larger edition with the same printing forms (stencils), the mutation structures that result from the manual process of printing, called short blast structures by Bernstein , make it impossible to produce two completely identical prints, as in industrial printing .