Editing Color printing (section)

==History of color printing==
[[Woodblock printing on textiles]] preceded printing on paper in both East Asia and Europe, and the use of different blocks to produce patterns in color was common.  The earliest way of adding color to items printed on paper was by hand-coloring, and this was widely used for printed images in both Europe and East Asia. Chinese [[woodcut]]s have this from at least the 13th century, and European ones from very shortly after their introduction in the 15th century, where it continued to be practiced, sometimes at a very skilled level, until the 19th century—elements of the official British [[Ordnance Survey]] maps were hand-colored by boys until 1875.  Early European printed books often left spaces for [[initial]]s, [[rubric]]s and other elements to be added by hand, just as they had been in [[manuscript]]s, and a few early printed books had elaborate borders and [[miniature (illuminated manuscript)|miniatures]] added. However this became much rarer after about 1500.

===East Asia===
Traditional East Asian printing of both text and images used [[woodblock printing]], effectively the same technique as [[woodcut]] in the West, and printing in a number of colors by using multiple blocks, each inked in a different color,  was known from early on.

====China====
British art historian [[Michael Sullivan (art historian)|Michael Sullivan]] writes that "the earliest color printing known in China, and indeed in the whole world, is a two-color [[Book frontispiece|frontispiece]] to a [[Buddhist]] [[sutra]] scroll, dated 1346". Color prints were also used later in the [[Ming Dynasty]].<ref name="Sullivan">{{cite book|author=Michael Sullivan|title=The Arts of China|url=https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_CzdICSqnELkC|edition=Third|date=18 June 1984|publisher=University of California Press|isbn=978-0-520-04918-5|page=[https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_CzdICSqnELkC/page/n222 203]}}</ref> In Chinese [[woodblock printing]], early color woodcuts mostly occur in luxury books about art, especially the more prestigious medium of painting. The first known example is a book on ink-cakes printed in 1606, and color technique reached its height in books on painting published in the seventeenth century. Notable examples are Ming-era Chinese painter [[Hu Zhengyan]]'s ''Treatise on the Paintings and Writings of the Ten Bamboo Studio'' of 1633, and the ''[[Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden]]'' published in 1679 and 1701, and printed in five colors.<ref>L Sickman & A Soper, "The Art and Architecture of China", Pelican History of Art, 3rd ed 1971, Penguin, LOC 70-125675</ref>

====Japan====
[[File:Eisen1.jpg|thumb|left|200px|Bijin (beautiful woman) [[ukiyo-e]] by [[Keisai Eisen]], before 1848]]
In Japan, color woodcuts were used for both sheet prints and book illustrations, though these techniques are better known within the history of prints. The "full-color" technique, called [[nishiki-e]] in its fully developed form, spread rapidly, and was used widely for sheet prints from the 1760s on. Text was nearly always monochrome, and many books continued to be published with monochrome illustrations [[sumizuri-e]], but the growth of the popularity of ''[[ukiyo-e]]'' brought with it demand for ever increasing numbers of colors and complexity of techniques. By the nineteenth century most artists designed prints that would be published in color. Major stages of this development were:

*''Sumizuri-e'' (墨摺り絵, "ink printed pictures") - monochrome printing using only black ink
*''Tan-e'' (丹絵) - monochrome sumizuri-e prints with handcoloring; distinguished by use of orange highlights using a red pigment called ''tan''
*"Beni-e" (紅絵, "red pictures") - monochrome sumizuri-e prints with handcoloring; distinguished by use of red ink details or highlights. Should not be confused with "benizuri-e", below.
*''[[Urushi-e]]'' (漆絵) - a method in which glue was used to thicken the ink, emboldening the image; gold, mica and other substances were often used to enhance the image further. This technique was often used in combination with hand coloring. ''Urushi-e'' can also refer to paintings using [[lacquer]] instead of paint; lacquer was very rarely if ever used on prints.
*''[[Benizuri-e]]'' (紅摺り絵, "crimson printed pictures") - images printed in two or three colors, usually containing red and green pigments, as well as black ink. This printing technique should not be confused with "beni-e", above. Both "beni-e" and "benizuri-e" are so named for the predominant reddish colorants, derived from dyes of the safflower plant (beni 紅).
*''Nishiki-e'' (錦絵, "brocade pictures") - a method in which multiple blocks were used for separate portions of the image, allowing a number of colors to be utilized to achieve incredibly complex and detailed images; a separate block would be carved to apply only to the portion of the image designated for a single color. [[Printing registration|Registration marks]] called ''kentō'' (見当) were used to ensure correspondence between the application of each block.

Further developments followed from refinements of technique and trends in taste. For instance:

*''[[Aizuri-e]]'' (藍摺り絵, "indigo printed pictures"), ''Murasaki-e'' (紫絵, "purple pictures"), and other styles in which a single color would be used in addition to, or instead of, black ink. These are specialty techniques that grew in popularity in the nineteenth century, though a few examples can be seen earlier.

===Europe===
[[File:The Public Promenade MET DT4549.jpg|thumb|[[Philibert-Louis Debucourt]], ''The Public Promenade'', 1792. Printed in color from various plates, using etching, engraving, and aquatint.  One of the leading achievements of the French 18th-century color-print.]]
Most early methods of color printing involved several prints, one for each color, although there were various ways of printing two colors together if they were separate. Liturgical and many other kinds of books required rubrics, normally printed in red; these were long done by a separate print run with a red forme for each page.  Other methods were used for single-leaf [[Old master print|prints]]. The [[chiaroscuro woodcut]] was a European method developed in the early 16th century, where to a normal woodcut block with a linear image (the "line block"), one or more colored "tone blocks" printed in different colors would be added. This was the method developed in Germany; in Italy only tone blocks were often used, to create an effect more like a wash drawing. [[Jacob Christoph Le Blon]] developed a method using three [[Intaglio (printmaking)|intaglio]] plates, usually in [[mezzotint]]; these were overprinted to achieve a wide range of colors.

In the 19th century a number of different methods of color printing, using woodcut (technically [[Chromoxylography]]) and other methods, were developed in Europe, which for the first time achieved widespread commercial success, so that by the later decades the average home might contain many examples, both hanging as prints and as book illustrations. [[George Baxter (printer)|George Baxter]] patented in 1835 a method using an intaglio line plate (or occasionally a [[lithograph]]), printed in black or a dark color, and then overprinted with up to twenty different colors from woodblocks. [[Edmund Evans]] used relief and wood throughout, with up to eleven different colors, and latterly specialized in illustrations for children's books, using fewer blocks but overprinting non-solid areas of color to achieve blended colors. English Artists such as [[Randolph Caldecott]], [[Walter Crane]] and [[Kate Greenaway]] were influenced by the Japanese prints now available and [[Japonisme|fashionable]] in Europe to create a suitable style, with flat areas of color.

[[Chromolithography]] was another process, which by the end of the 19th century had become dominant, although this used multiple prints with a stone for each color. Mechanical color separation, initially using photographs of the image taken with three different color filters, reduced the number of prints needed to three. [[Zincography]], with [[zinc]] plates, later replaced lithographic stones, and remained the most common method of color printing until the 1930s.
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