The Printed Picture

[Synthetik]

I recently picked up a copy of Richard Benson's new book 'The Printed Picture'. It's a rather through journey through the history of the various techniques and technologies used for printing throughout human history. Over the years of Studio Artist development i've tried to add features to allow for the simulation of many of the techniques described in the book. For example, some of Paul's work or the techniques he uses in Studio Artist ended up coming out of discussions we had about various approaches to simulate chromolithography. All of these old approaches to printing, proto photography, post photography are all detailed in the book. It's all presented in an easily digestible manor for the modern attention deficit world way of viewing information, you can open the book at random and read a page or 2 and come away with something. The book reads like an extended version of one of his lectures, and was probably constructed by organizing his lecture material into book form, so it's all fairly easily digestible chunks of information. Again, as someone who needs to immerse himself in understanding the technology of previous approaches to art or printing so we can simulate those techniques in Studio Artist, i find books like this one particularly valuable resources. The whole Japanese approach to applying ink for woodblock printing vs how was done in the western world for example is fascinating to read about, and will probably lead to a new studio artist feature at some point when i get around to implementing it.

[Paul Perlow]

That looks like a great book. I will check it out. Thanks. I also have been planning on submitting my work to Moma and seeing if they were interested.