Fashion Design Drawing

The sketch is photographed through a very fine mesh so that the result gives a picture composed of small dots a larger mesh being used if for printing on cheap paper.

It is then etched on metal by various processes, and mounted as in the line block. Unless carefully printed on good paper, the spaces between the dots will fill up with ink.

Half-tones can be executed in water-colour, crayon, or oils, but must be in tones of black. A warm monochrome colour can be used, such as sepia, but it is difficult to appreciate depth of colour in that tone.

Whatever medium is used should be warm in tone, inclining to red, as any tint inclining to blue photographs badly, and the tone values are thereby lost.

Colour work can be represented either in flat tints or in light and shade. It is sometimes relieved by a process called " stippling," which is done by the block-maker himself. This appears in the printed work as various sized dots, squares, and fanciful patterns of lines oblique, vertical or horizontal, according to the artist's expressed desire. The stippling can be in colour, either singly or interwoven with contrasting colour, and sometimes in black. (See frontispiece.)

When reproducing colour in flat tones the artist would require to supply sketches of the different colours separately from the " key " colour, which gives the fines that hold the sketch together, and is generally stronger in tone. This is only one of the methods employed for this work, and is confined to the use of " line " blocks.

There are several methods of printing colour work in light and shade. The older method is chromo-fitho-graphy, where each colour is printed from a separate stone, but more recently aluminium plates have been used in place of the stone. In both cases the work is usually drawn on the printing surfaces of the stone or plate by hand. The most recent process is known as the " photo-litho offset " process, by which a reversed impression of the subject is conveyed to an absorbent composition surface, which may be either horizontal or cylindrical. The sheets are then passed over this surface under pressure, and with the necessary inking.