Editing Printmaking (section)

=== Drypoint===
<div style="width:35%; float: right; margin: 10px; padding: 8px; border: 1px solid #8888aa;">Artists using this technique include
[[Mary Cassatt]],
[[Francis Seymour Haden]],
[[Master of the Housebook]],
[[Richard Spare]],
[[William Lionel Wyllie]]
</div>
{{main|Drypoint}}
[[File:Rembrandt The Three Crosses 1653.jpg|thumb|upright|left|''[[The Three Crosses]]'', 1653 [[drypoint]] by [[Rembrandt]]]]
A variant of engraving, done with a sharp point, rather than a v-shaped [[Burin (engraving)|burin]]. While engraved lines are very smooth and hard-edged, drypoint scratching leaves a rough burr at the edges of each line. This burr gives drypoint prints a characteristically soft, and sometimes blurry, line quality. Because the pressure of printing quickly destroys the burr, drypoint is useful only for very small editions; as few as ten or twenty impressions. To counter this, and allow for longer print runs, electro-plating (here called steelfacing) has been used since the nineteenth century to harden the surface of a plate.

The technique appears to have been invented by the [[Housebook Master]], a south German fifteenth-century artist, all of whose prints are in drypoint only. Among the most famous artists of the old master print, Albrecht Dürer produced three drypoints before abandoning the technique; Rembrandt used it frequently, but usually in conjunction with etching and engraving.
{{Clear left}}