Print Types

Serigraphs (Silk Screens Prints)

Screenprinting, silkscreening, or serigraphy is a printmaking technique that creates a sharp-edged image using a stencil. A screenprint or serigraph is an image created using this technique.

A screen is made of a piece of porous, finely woven fabric stretched over a frame of aluminum or wood. Areas of the screen are blocked off with a non-permeable material to form a stencil, which is a negative of the image to be printed; that is, the open spaces are where the ink will appear.

The screen is placed atop a substrate such as papyrus or fabric. Ink is placed on top of the screen, and a fill bar is used to fill the mesh openings with ink. The operator begins with the fill bar at the rear of the screen and behind a reservoir of ink. The operator lifts the screen to prevent contact with the substrate and then using a slight amount of downward force pulls the fill bar to the front of the screen. This effectively fills the mesh openings with ink and moves the ink reservoir to the front of the screen. The operator then uses a rubber blade to move the mesh down to the substrate and pushes the squeegee to the rear of the screen. The ink that is in the mesh opening is transferred by capillary action to the substrate in a controlled and prescribed amount, i.e. the wet ink deposit is equal to the thickness of the stencil. As the rubber blade moves toward the rear of the screen the tension of the mesh pulls the mesh up away from the substrate leaving the ink upon the substrate surface.

Charley’s Serigraph prints are limited edition prints, numbered in series of 500 to 2000 prints. Many sold out images are also available on the secondary market. We will offer both as supply allows.

Ford Times Prints

Ford Times prints get their name from the publication for which Charley worked, ‘Ford Times’. Charley’s art was featured in this publication for many years in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It was widely loved and soon Charley was answering a demand for Silk Screen prints of these images he made ( in his garage, as the story goes). These prints may or may not be signed, or may bear an estate seal, showing they came from the Charley & Edie Harper Art Studio. These prints are not numbered, but Charlie is purported to have said he never made more than 100 of any image.

Giclee Prints

The word “giclée,” as a fine art term, has come to be associated with prints using fade-resistant “archival” inks and the inkjet printers that use them.

Artists tend to use these types of inkjet printing processes commonly called “Giclée” to make reproductions of their original two-dimensional artwork, photographs or computer generated art. Professionally produced inkjet prints are much more expensive on a “per print” basis than the traditional four color offset lithography process originally used to make such reproductions (a large format inkjet can cost more than $50 a print, not including scanning and color correction).

Giclee’ printing has the added advantage of allowing the artist to control every aspect of the image, its color and the substrate printed on, and even allows the artist to own and operate the printer itself.

Charley’s Giclee prints are numbered limited edition prints.

Lithographs

Lithography is a method for printing using a plate with a completely smooth surface.

Lithography uses chemical processes to create an image. For instance, the positive part of an image would be a hydrophobic chemical, while the negative image would be hydrophilic. Thus, when the plate is introduced to a compatible printing ink and water mixture, the ink will adhere to the positive image and the water will clean the negative image. This allows a flat print plate to be used, enabling much longer and more detailed print runs than the older physical methods of printing.

In offset lithography, which depends on photographic processes, flexible aluminum, plastic or paper printing plates are used. The plate is affixed to a cylinder on a printing press. Dampening rollers apply water, which covers the blank portions of the plate but is repelled by the emulsion of the image area. Ink, which is hydophobic, is then applied by the inking rollers, which is repelled by the water and only adheres to the emulsion of the image area–such as the type and photographs on a newspaper page.

If this image were directly transferred to paper, it would create a negative image and the paper would become too wet. Instead, the plate rolls against a cylinder covered with a rubber blanket, which squeezes away the water,picks up the ink and transfers it to the paper with accurate pressure. The paper rolls across the blanket drum and the image is transferred to the paper. Because the image is first transferred, or offset to the rubber drum, this reproduction method is known as offset lithography.

Charley’s lithographs are open edition prints.