Awesome Printing

Printed full-color images are often made from dot patterns called halftones. From a distance, they produce the illusion of smooth shades and millions of colors, but made from just four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Posy’s video offers a brief overview of the technique and a series of close-up dot patterns zoomed out to see their full images.

Zoom in Progress takes us on a tour of a factory in Korea that produces full-color product packaging. Along the way, you’ll see their printing operations, along with their gluing, die-cutting, and box-folding machines. But the most satisfying part is when they use hand tools to remove the edge pieces from the cardboard.

This fascinating short video shows how a factory adds ink to Mahjong tiles. After placing the engraved tiles onto a platform, a computer-controlled arm uses inkjets to spray precise amounts of red and black pigments onto the right spots on each tile. The machine has nothing on this artist who still makes Mahjong tiles by hand.

If you ever wondered how factories print onto the insides of ceramic bowls and pots, wonder no longer. This video posted by Engineerflex shows off the ingenious but silly-looking process. Turn on the audio for appropriate sound effects. Need more? YouTube has a bunch of videos of these ceramic pad printing machines.

As color arrangements go, we’ve always loved the smooth transitions that occur as hues blend to form a gradient. In this wonderfully satisfying clip from Jukebox Print, watch nine ink globs gradually mix at their on the platen of a printing press in preparation for the paper to roll through.

’80s kids might remember a little computer program called The Print Shop. Broderbund’s whiz-bang piece of software let users print out greeting cards, banners, and signs on dot-matrix printers. Now you can relive this classic thanks to Melody and April Ayres-Griffiths online emulation, complete with the ability to print to PDFs.

Korean artist Lee Ji-hee created this incredibly intricate papercraft replica of the original Heidelberg Letterpress. She made the sculpture from paper and corrugated cardboard, to celebrate the history of the printing industry in Seoul, South Korea. Find more of the artist’s awesome work in her Behance portfolio.

Looking for another fun project to do at home? Artist Mathieu Stern shows us how to use digital photo software plus a couple of specialty chemicals to make your own unique cyanotype prints at home. You can get the chemicals or pre-treated fabric sheets on Amazon or Blick Art Supplies.

These days, most wallpaper is printed using industrial printing presses. But check out this wild 1960s footage of a British wallpaper factory, who still made the rolls of wall art using hand-carved block printing, and hand-applied flocking.

It’s amazing all the cool things you can do with a simple X/Y motorized rig. Here, Rochester Institute of Technology’s Ted Kinsman shows how to create images using different sized droplets of colored liquid, like coffee, ink, or red wine, which then soak into the paper.