Which Printmaking Techniques a Visitor Can Recognise in the Gallery

Stand in front of a print in a gallery and the first question is usually what you are actually looking at. A print is not one thing. It is a set of decisions made in a workshop, and those decisions leave marks you can read from the other side of the room once you know which marks belong to which method. The label does not always spell this out, so knowing the difference between a carved block, an etched plate and a stretched screen turns a glance into a longer look.

The Janet Turner Print Museum on the Chico State campus is built around exactly that kind of looking. It holds a collection of prints, and its fall exhibition runs from August 25 to October 17, 2026. Before any of that, though, you need the vocabulary. Here is how the main families of printmaking separate themselves on the wall.

Relief prints: what comes off the block

In relief printing, the artist cuts away everything that should stay white or bare. The raised surface that survives the knife takes the ink, the paper is pressed against it, and the image prints in reverse. That reversal is the giveaway. A woodcut or a linocut often shows the tool marks left behind: gouges, streaks, the grain of the wood running through the ink.

Look at the edges of the shapes. Relief prints tend to have crisp, slightly jagged contours where the blade stopped. Large flat areas of solid black are common, because a broad uncut surface holds ink well. If you can see the direction of a carving tool in a shadow, you are almost certainly looking at a relief print.

Intaglio: ink held below the surface

Intaglio works the opposite way. Instead of cutting away the background, the artist cuts into the plate itself, usually a metal one, and the ink sits in the grooves. The surface is then wiped clean, and the pressure of the press draws the ink out of the lines onto dampened paper. The result is a print where the line feels pressed into the sheet rather than laid on top of it.

Because the plate is squeezed against the paper under heavy pressure, an intaglio print usually carries a plate mark: a shallow rectangular indentation around the image where the edge of the metal bit into the sheet. Hold the print at an angle to the light and that border becomes obvious. Etching, engraving and drypoint all sit in this family, and the differences between them are a matter of how the line was made rather than where the ink sits.

Screen prints: flat colour laid in layers

Screen printing forces ink through a stretched mesh, with areas blocked out so the ink only reaches the paper in chosen places. The method favours flat, even colour and hard edges. Instead of the grainy texture of a carved block or the bitten line of an etched plate, a screen print gives you colour that sits evenly across a shape and stops cleanly at a boundary.

The easiest tell is registration. A screen print is built in layers, one colour at a time, and the layers have to line up. Slight misalignment between a shape and its colour, a sliver of white paper where two colours should meet, is normal and often visible. That is not a flaw in the print; it is a record of how it was made. Pop art and poster work lean on this method for exactly the reason that it delivers a flat, unshaded surface.

What does the label tell you that the print does not?

The label is where the workshop meets the wall. A good one will name the artist, the title, the date and the method, and it may add the edition number, a figure in the form of two numbers split by a slash. The Janet Turner Print Museum page does not publish a running explanation of print terms, so treat the label as the marker of what the museum chose to name and leave the rest to your eye.

Not every label answers every question. Some name the artist and the process and stop there; some name the process in a single word. When a label says only "print", the marks on the paper are your evidence, and the relief, intaglio or screen logic described above is what you test it against. If a detail is missing from the label and from the page, that is where the paper has to do the talking.

What does an edition number tell you?

Printmaking is a repeatable process, and the edition number records how many times it was repeated. The number shows where a particular impression falls within the run. A smaller edition means fewer pulls from the plate or block, which is why collectors often look at the edition before they look at anything else.

What an edition does not tell you is whether the print is a reproduction of a painting. It is not. A print made by hand from a block, plate or screen is an original in its own right, produced by the same method the artist used to create the image. A photographic reproduction of a painting is a different object altogether, however it is labelled. Once you know the methods, that distinction becomes visible at a glance.

When several methods share one sheet

Artists rarely stay inside one family. A single print can combine an etched line with a screen-printed wash of colour, or set a carved block against a background printed from a plate. When that happens, the tells stack up rather than cancel out: the plate mark sits beneath the flat colour, the bitten line runs through the even screen layer, the carved shadow sits beside the wiped groove.

Look for the seam where two methods meet. A screen layer over an intaglio line usually keeps the line visible underneath, because the line is below the paper surface and the colour sits on top of it. A relief shape printed onto an intaglio background shows the tonal shift where the paper got pressed one way and then another. These are the moments where a print stops being a picture and becomes a record of a process.

Where the collection sits and when to go

The museum is on the Chico State campus, in Room 123 of the Arts and Humanities Building, with the entrance on the northeast side near Laxson Auditorium. The nearest cross streets are Salem and West 2nd Street. If you are driving, street parking around downtown is metered on weekdays and free on weekends, and there is secure bike parking outside the museum for anyone arriving on two wheels.

Hours are Tuesday to Saturday, noon to 4 PM, with a late Thursday session until 8 PM. The museum follows the Chico State academic year rather than the civic calendar, and it closes over Fall Break, Winter Break, Spring Break and Summer Break. The Turner exhibition calendar is the place to confirm which shows are on before you set out, and the visit page lists the email address for arranging a special appointment. The mailing address is 400 W. First St., Chico, CA 95929-0820. The gallery and exhibition season pages carry the whole year of shows across the two cities, and the juried student exhibitions hang in this same building each spring, which is where these techniques most often reach a wall for the first time.

Start with one print

You do not need to hold all of this in your head at once. Pick a single print on the wall, walk close enough to see whether the ink sits on the surface or sinks into a groove, look for the plate mark, check whether the colour is flat or textured, and then read the label to see whether your reading matches. The habit of asking how a thing was made changes what you see on every wall after it. On your next visit, the fall exhibition is a good place to test the eye: read the label first, then look at the paper and see whether the method agrees with you.

About the Janet Turner Print Museum

The Janet Turner Print Museum is a print collection and exhibition space in Room 123 of the Arts and Humanities Building on the Chico State campus, with its entrance on the northeast side near Laxson Auditorium. It is open Tuesday to Saturday, noon to 4 PM, with late hours on Thursday until 8 PM during the Chico State academic year, and it closes over the university's Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer Breaks. Its fall 2026 exhibition runs from August 25 to October 17. Special appointments can be arranged by email, and the museum's mailing address is 400 W. First St., Chico, CA 95929-0820.