he color prints that Blake produced, between 1794 and 1796 but a few as late as c. 1808 (e.g., Jerusalem proofs and a handful of plates in America copy M have more than one color printed from the plate), range from very simple to very elaborate, from one or two colors applied to relief areas only, as in plate a4 of There is No Natural Religion copy C (illus. 6), to colors applied to both relief plateaus and etched shallows, as in plate 18 of The First Book of Urizen copy C (illus. 7), where Blake also used different colored inks for text and illustration. Blake also color printed relief etchings without text, such as the full page illustrations in The Book of Urizen (illus. 31-32), and intaglio works, such as Albion rose. His color prints reflect a printmaker far less orthodox than Landseer or any other of his period, and far more the artist (rather than the precision mechanic) in the print studio and in his thinking about graphic art. He was as angry as Landseer and others about engraving being dismissed as mere copywork, but instead of attempting to sensitize his audience into seeing dots and lozenges as a virtuoso performance / translation in metal, Blake deployed another strategy. He erased the grounds for hierarchies in the arts by reducing both painting and engraving to “drawing” and asserting that “he who Draws best must be the best Artist” (E 582), and by producing prints whose aesthetic originality was stunning and even, as with the white-line etching of Deaths Door and many of the color prints, confrontational. He showed how prints could be as original and unique as drawings and paintings, as creative as the works normally imitated in prints. This new “method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving” (E 692) did more than combine—or etch into printable relief—text and image. When Blake printed in colors, his relief-etched copperplates offered two different printing surfaces, relief and intaglio, that he fully exploited as an artist, creating color images unlike any ever seen before, such as the pages in The Song of Los copies A-F, The Book of Urizen copies A, C-F, and J, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copies E and F, and Visions of the Daughters of Albion copies F and R. It is in color printing that his “method of Printing” fully met and joined with the art of the “Painter” (E 692).

Blake’s colors were opaque, water-miscible paints in which pigments were most likely mixed with water into a paste and then ground with a vehicle of warm, diluted “size” (glue) or a gum with the physical properties of glue (Essick, Printmaker 126-28, 259-60; Viscomi, Idea 121). Mixing this vehicle with a little ox gall and hydromel (honey and water), ingredients used to keep gum arabic-based water colors moist, will retard the drying action of the paint. By degreasing the copper with a solvent, Blake could keep the paint from beading up, and thus also help the colors to transfer from metal to paper. Blake’s departure from conventional color printing was in printing two surfaces of the plate as well as using—on the same plate at the same time—both oil-based inks and water-miscible paints. Actually, Blake combined oil with water not only when printing inked plates with size-color, but also when printing on dampened paper (the standard practice for all plate-printers) and when washing or painting prints in water colors, which was “a prime function of water color wash for five hundred years” (Cohn 11). Size-color can be placed on the plate along with oil-based ink, thereby making it possible for Blake to print both inked text and colored designs simultaneously. Blake could wash the resulting impressions in water colors because size-color is insoluble once dry, and thus not disturbed by being re-wetted. The mottled or reticulated texture so typical of his color prints was caused partly by the paper pulling away from a buttery size-color on the plate, and partly by the water colors interacting with an oily surface and attaching to the exposed paper where the ink had reticulated. The surface tension between the oil-based ink and water-based paint was also deliberately manipulated to create various types of tactile surfaces.