The water only adhered to the gum-treated parts, making them even more oil-repellant. For printing, the stone was first moistened.
The stone was then treated with a mixture of weak acid and gum arabic ('etch') that made the parts of the stone's surface that were not protected by the grease more hydrophilic (water attracting). Originally, the image to be printed was drawn with a greasy substance, such as oil, fat, or wax onto the surface of a smooth and flat limestone plate. Sea anemones from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur ( Artforms of Nature), 1904 A lithograph is something printed by lithography, but this term is only used for fine art prints and some other, mostly older, types of printed matter, not for those made by modern commercial lithography. Lithography can be used to print text or images onto paper or other suitable material.
It was invented in 1796 by the German author and actor Alois Senefelder and was initially used mostly for musical scores and maps. The printing is from a stone ( lithographic limestone) or a metal plate with a smooth surface. Lithography (from Ancient Greek λίθος, lithos 'stone', and γράφειν, graphein 'to write') is a planographic method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. For the microfabrication process, see microlithography.Ī lithograph of Charles Marion Russell's The Custer Fight (1903), with the range of tones fading toward the edges.
