What are 4-color, 6-color, 8-color, 12-color, inkjet, pigment, Giclee [zjee’-clay], serigraph, and lithograph prints all about?  A print is a print, right?  And lithographs are good, right?

 

Well, sort of.  It’s all a matter of quality and durability.

 

N-color reproductions are typically pixilated, meaning that the output is actually a series of dots very close together.  The number of colors denotes the breadth of color palette.  A typical 4-color palette, involves the colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (i.e. CMYK), where larger palttes can include Red, Green, Blue, and so-called middle-tones.  By layering those colors using adjacent dots, a wide array of simulated colors can fool the human eye into believing that actual color is present.  That has to do with how the human eye uses lenses, the resolution of nerve endings in the retina, and interpolation (i.e. filling in the blanks) in bringing an image to the brain.  However, under a microscope, the colored dot image begins to deteriorate and appear imperceptible as the compartmentalization of the dots is revealed.  A typical color magazine might use between 150 and 600 dots per inch.

 

Inkjet and pigmented jet technology layers thousands of dots per inch, boosting the resolution considerably, and relying less on retinal interpretation.  However, inkjet platforms tend to use dyes instead of pigments to convey color.  Dyes tend to rely on chemical reactions with the host surface, while pigments tend to rely on adhesive and bonding agents to bind colored media to the paper or canvas.  Most pigment technologies are color-fast to nearly 75 years, while dyes are more like 25 years.  However, some “old school” thinking persists that pigments are better.  The jury seems to still be out on that topic.  The bottom line:  photons are moving energy particles and can damage targets when reflected.  All images deteriorate in the presence of light and the only true salvation is absence from light (and other hostile elements).  It’s tough to enjoy a rendering with the lights out.  The question is: how many years would you like to view the same rendering before perceptible fading occurs?

 

Giclee [zjee’-clay] typically involves spraying high resolution pigments using multiple pass and layering technology, similar to that of inkjet, but typically with more texture and vibrancy.

 

Lithograph is a mechanical technique of lifting polygon regions of pigmented media onto a surface, and then transferring the media to paper (much like a rubber stamp).  Typically, there is one polygon plate (i.e. stamp) per discrete color, suggesting that a given piece of paper will be progressively re-run, once for each color plate.  The machinery involved can produce hundreds of prints in minutes, but alignment across multiple transfers is crucial to a quality outcome.

 

Serigraph is similar in nature to Lithograph, insofar as it uses a multiple overlay contact process to apply pigmented media, but instead of a stamp-like approach, it uses a silkscreen-like (i.e. stencil) approach to permit media to bleed through the plate and onto the paper.  Serigraphs are typically manually produced, and therefore costly.  The media tends to be richer than lithograph, but less precise from copy to copy.

 

The bottom line is that digital and inkjet technologies are advancing well past conventional mechanical means and really do represent the new frontier in art production.

There are two basic ways to print digital images: inkjet or pigment.  There are pros and cons to both, having mainly to do with color- and light-fastness.  But at that level, it’s sort of like the difference between a VS2 (flaws at some 40x magnification) and F (flawless) diamond; only your gemologist will know the perfection level for sure, because it is so many times beyond human perception (without magnification and/or special UV lighting aids).  Inkjet is more economical than pigmented renderings, and experts contend that pigmented renderings are “better”.

 

Kevin believes that the “real deal” has to do with how the original image is created in the first place, and less to do with how it is physically printed.  Have you ever sent or received a fax and compared the output with printing a document directly from a product like Microsoft Word?  The fax is almost always distorted, and the direct print is almost always perfect; this is perceptible by the human eye.  The reason is that a fax process involves document scanning technology, which never looks at the content of what it is copying, but instead takes tiny pictures, one “dot” at a time, across the entire page, left to right, tiny row by tiny row.  The number of dots scanned is called the resolution.  The more dots, the higher the quality of rendering, but the longer it takes to transmit the scanned image.  So a scanning-based technology must (by definition) lose resolution in favor of economics of storage.

 

Compare that to simply printing a document from Microsoft Word.  In that case, there is no “dot” image involved.  Instead, the raw text and markup queues (like fonts, point sizes, margins, page size, etc) are sent directly to the printer and the printer uses on-board software and hardware to exactly draw the images of textual letters in the maximum resolution of the print heads.  In short, Word says “print the word ‘the’ in that spot using this font and point size”, and the printer figures out how to draw the letters ‘t’, ‘h’, and ‘e’ using 1,200 (or more) dots per inch.

 

There are two fundamental methods of creating computerized digital images: Bit Image, and Line Art (thus the difference between a “Paint” program and a “Drawing” program).  The Bit Image approach paints one dot at a time (like the fax machine) in a specific color and the size and placement of the dot are pre-ordained (sort of like graph paper, where each square can receive only a single solid color; if you stand back far enough, the concept of squares fade away as your brain focuses on meaning).  The Line Art approach uses Bezier Curve mathematics to plot curved lines to any resolution using classic mathematical Cartesian X and Y plotting techniques.

 

What happens when you want to expand a Bit Image by 11.3%?  Well, every 100 dots must be turned into 111.3 dots.  But how do you create a 0.3 of a dot?  Well, you don’t!  Instead, only 111 dots are generated, and the extra 11 dots are mathematic interpolations (i.e. educated guesses) based upon what the other dots in the neighborhood look like.  In short, the original work is lost in favor of a computer algorithm that simulates the new set of dots.  So, Bit Images do not scale to different sizes very easily without losing something in the process.

 

Bezier Curve mathematics does not suffer from changes in size, because the curved line is drawn based upon a precise mathematical formula and uses the resolution of the printer to determine the dots per inch (i.e. Cartesian X and Y coordinates).  Every rendering is exactly proportioned to the size desired.  Bezier Curve technology is used with the Postscript computer language, used by most popular printer devices, but first pioneered by Adobe and deployed on early Apple Macintosh computers.

 

Have you ever noticed when looking at a document from within Adobe Acrobat that the pages can be scaled to any size and that proportions are perfectly preserved?  Now, contrast that with products like Microsoft, which use a combination of Postscript and Bit Image fonts to produce the output.  Distortions can occur, particularly with fonts.

 

It sounds like Bezier Curves are the only way to go, so what gives?  Well, Bezier Curves can be used to create polygons, and polygons can be instructed by computer software to be area-filled with color.  The device that draws the polygon determines the maximum number of dots to receive the same color, thus the resolution automatically fits the device instead of being a property of the original image.  That generally means that line art drawings are composed of a series of adjacent or overlapping polygons, each with different color fill.  Remember the old “paint by numbers” kits that you could buy to have your child become an instant artist?  Well, that pretty much describes polygon fill technology; the numbered template can be projected to any size, but each area fill (i.e. numbered region) must have a pre-ordained color.  Draw outside the lines, or fail to evenly apply color inside one of the numbered areas, and the original artist’s intent is lost.

 

Contrast that with the ability to smear colored dots across a white canvas (on the screen) using simulated paint brushes, paint sprayers, and color pallets.  Line Art can start looking very limited when compared to pixilated, airbrushed, and feathered effects.

 

When Kevin saw his first Nagel lithograph, he immediately thought about Bezier Curve and polygon fill technology, as the Apple Macintosh had debuted right around the time that Nagel went mainstream.  The very nature of lithograph and serigraph techniques are rooted in polygon fill technology, and use stone tablets (or silk strands) as resolution for polygon edges.

 

So, the motif first mainstreamed by Nagel in the 80’s actually lends itself perfectly to Bezier Curve and polygon fill technology, if the lack of certain details in facial components can be overlooked.  That makes the digital representations purely mathematical and reproducible at any scale and with any color correction.

Kevin calls his Bezier Curve and polygon fill works Digital Originals (endowing each work with the “D.O.” insignia preceding the instance number within a limited run) because the dot output scales to the maximum provided by an output device, which is typically many times that of human perception.

 

Kevin strictly adheres to the Limited Edition manual signature and encoding standard and destroys the digital original upon rendering the last edition image.

 

Why collect Kevin’s Digital Originals?  They are much higher quality and resolution than could ever be produced conventionally or by hand and convey the same collector qualities as conventional media.