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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

collotypes, reproducing photographs, lithograph

College

Fine Arts and Communications

Department

Art

Abstract

A few years ago I enjoyed a book in Special Collections and was impressed with the unique quality of it’s pictures. I found out that they were collotypes, something of which I had never heard. A year or two later a professor asked me if I was familiar with this process. I learned that collotype is a photomechanical printmaking technique that was used in the past for reproducing photographs. With the advent of automated printing machinery the manual process of collotype became too impractical for commercial purposes. However, the machines used in high-speed printing are unable to match the inherent richness of a collotype. When man’s hand is removed from an artistic process then quality is often compromised. An analogy may be the letters on the monitor before me. Though geometrically precise, they lack the life that remains in a hand written page. A collotype results in “tawny, warm undertones of value”, and “provides exquisite color tonalities.”(Rush). For these reasons collotype has gained popularity among artists today. The ORCA award has allowed me to pursue learning this technique which I hope to effectively incorporate in my artwork.

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