When I was young I spent two years training to be a printer.  I used the type trays now found in antique stores.  I used offset presses.  I learned to use pre-press equipment that is now all but obsolete due to the impact of computers in the printing industry.  The things I learned during those two years had been pretty standard for over half a century.  The basic technology involved was older.  These were important years in my life because the way I learned to make a plate for lithographic printing press was almost exactly the way I now make a platinum print.

Plates for planographic (offset, lithography, etc.) printing were confined to stone for a period of time. That is when lithography got its name.  It didn't take long for printers to adopt thin zinc plates after lugging the heavy very special stones around for a while.  Then came the use of photosensitive solutions for placing an image or text onto the plate.  Since before the American Civil War printers have prepared plates of stone and metal using a "negative" and photosensitive materials.  They developed tools and recipes that eventually became the process we still use today (and is still called lithography even though there isn't a stone involved). The printing methods I learned back then have become almost unrecognizable due to computers but some things haven't changed; fine printing still requires a negative.  So does platinum printing.

The first thing I do when I get done making a pencil drawing, generally about two to three weeks work, is...celebrate by taking my wife and daughter to dinner.  Then I go make a negative using some of the equipment I learned to use so many years ago.  My negative is made on a special film.  it is called copy film and is intended to be used specifically in copying an image from paper.  My negative must be the same size as the picture I intend to make.  As I make my negative, I skip one step that I used when making a lithographic plate.  I don't "screen" my negative so that it becomes a halftone.  Screening breaks an image into dots that will print as mid tones.  I have no intention of corrupting my midtones into dots.  Some printers produce platinum prints using dots, but, for me, there is no need.  The creative process is not limited to the initial drawing; my negative is often hand painted and drawn upon with lithographers crayon.  No need for a printing machine since I do not intend to make a "run".  Once a printer makes a negative it is put onto the surface of a plate.  The plate and negative are then exposed to ultraviolet light.  In the old days sunlight (a fine source of ultraviolet rays) was used but most printers now use platemakers as they have for nearly a century.  Once the plate is exposed to these rays it is bathed chemicals and prepared for the press.  Printers use a chemical bath to make their plate attract water in some places and repel water in others.  this in turn allows ink to adhere in only the specified places.  Then their plate is done.  Here is where mass production printers and I part ways.  First of all, printers order their plates ready made but I must make my own.  I use fine art paper, made by Arches, that I have prepared myself using a mixture of platinum, a little palladium (another noble metal like platinum and gold) and some Ferric Oxalate.  If I make my negative just right, I won't need anything else.  Each drawing has to be printed with its own adjusted recipe.  Where light strikes the paper "plate" it makes the platinum stick fast; the rest will wash away.  When the paper is all clean, I hang it up to dry.  My favorite part is hanging my prints up to dry.  I feel like an old-time craftsman.  An offset printer can make thousands of prints in the time it takes me to make one because every picture I make is done by hand.  There simply is no faster way to print better than the way I do it.  I'll accept this limitation because I don't intend to produce a perfect quantity, just a perfect hand painted print.

After my print is made and dry, I put it on my drawing table and paint it.  I use the finest watercolors.  When the watercolors are dry, I apply pastel to heighten and enrich the colors.  It is all very simple and very basic art.  The many hours I spend to make each picture are justified by the result.

For those who like quality, detail, intricacy, definition, craftsmanship, and art that will last for centuries, there is no better way to make art.  I've worked a lifetime to get to this point.  I am becoming an artist.