The stones are grubbed from deep quarry pits in damp slabs of various thicknesses and qualities. Of all that the quarry yields, only some 2 or 3 per cent are sufficiently perfect to be of use to us. The expert overseer picks out the good slabs, marking their grades, those of the best grade being subsequently planed on both sides and marketed at an extra price as double-faced stones.
Some stones show a peppering of red points (iron), and others are marred by the presence of fossils. Still others show broad color bands that are visually undesirable for the draftsman and that contain in some cases a very remote possibility of injuriously affecting the print. Once or twice I have had bars appear in the print corresponding to color bars in the stone. Other stones have seams of what is called “glass.” So long as these are closed, as they usually are, most kinds of work may safely ignore them. If they are “open,” i.e., if they absorb water and give it out again in a wet line when the surrounding surface is dry, then they are dangerous. The best stones not only are fairly free from defects but show a fracture of peculiar smoothness and evenness.
Since the scraper of the press brings great pressure along a mere line, if the stones were not rather thick the pressure would break them. According to the area of its surface, a stone may have a thickness of from 1 1/2 to 5 or 6 inches. A stone having 300 or 400 square inches of surface—that is to say, one measuring about 18 by 20 inches—may weigh from 50 to 100 pounds. Selected second-hand stones are in no way inferior to new ones. When a stone has worn too thin to withstand the pressure of the scraper, it may be used as a mixing-table for the ink. Or it may be kept in use by reducing its size. If it is rather large and you elect not to trim it down but to cut it in two, this is readily done; or at any rate I do it, as follows: I support the stone on an edge which, on the under side of the stone, follows the line where the break is wanted. Directly above, on the upper side of the stone, I rule a line. A small chisel is set upright on this line and smartly hit with a light hammer. Sliding the chisel along after each blow, I hit again, clear across. If it remains firm, I repeat, listening carefully. Shortly I hear the clear ring of the stone give place to a dull sound, and know an effective crack is dividing it. A delicate tap causes it to drop apart.
The fractured surface is beautiful. It is almost as smooth as flint, so fine are its component grains. It is not hard, it is brittle and tense, and rings when struck. Since the natural rock has no appreciable texture of its own, we have the opportunity to create upon it by artificial means whatever texture exactly suits our needs.
CRAYONSTONE
DRAWING ON STONE AS A FINE ART
The range of every art corresponds to the physical nature of the substances used. Commonplace as this statement assuredly is, many writers, talkers, philosophers, and aesthetes still do not grasp either its truth or its importance; and naturally, for without sense-familiarity with the substances and processes of an art it is not possible that they should read the minds of the artists whose language these constitute. Pindar said: “To the cunning workman true knowledge comes, undeceitful.”
When crayonstone drawing was brought into the world, able artists (1820–60) saw and used it. Being workmen, they sensed the nature of the materials they saw and felt and spoke through. The outstanding character of the crayonstone mark is its granularity, coarse or fine as the stone is. It is peculiarly responsive to pressure. It responds in two ways: by darkening the area pressed upon, and also by increasing its size.
The surface of the stone is made of minute hills and valleys, lying in a plain. The crayon scrapes itself off against the tops of the hills. With light pressure, only the summits get covered, the interspaces remaining relatively wide. The tint thus composed has great fineness, paleness, and openness. Pressure on the crayon increases the size of these grains, adding at the same time many new and minute ones on the summits of those hills that are smaller. The tint is now darker and somewhat coarser. Ultimately, with pressure enough, all the hills and even the bottoms of the valleys are charged with crayon. The tint now is flat black with no texture at all.
As the tone gets darker and coarser, it still retains some refinement, some bloom. This depends upon very small grains of dark among the large ones and upon the presence of very small interstices of light everywhere.
Such is the lithographic tone, a clean sparkling interplay among particles of white and black. In white paper it does not exist; in flat black it does not. In all the gradations between these, it does.
This is the way it is on the stone. It is the business of the printing to present it thus in the print. If the printing does not do this, it is not good printing. If the etching eats away some of the small granules, the texture is coarsened, the tone is changed in value, the design is injured. If the inking is so handled as to fill up some of the small granules of light, the texture is coarsened, the values changed, the work injured.
Remembering that the hills, valleys, and grains just spoken of may be on any scale of size, according to the size of the grains of the abrasive material used in surfacing the stone, we see that the pictorial range of crayon-stone is practically boundless. Mouilleron reproduced Delacroix’s painting so well that this painter thought the print had qualities he hardly remembered putting into the painting. If lithography can do this from a painting, it can do it without any painting. Artists are not limited to mere sketches: they can elaborate as fully as they choose, and the stone will justify them.
In the history of the art, almost every sort of subject and style of treatment has sometime been essayed. Lions, as large as real ones, on billboards, and gnats, as small as real ones, on drawings of fruit, have been successfully dealt with. Portraiture has been done in every conceivable manner; and if the figure has been presented less often, this is not from any shortcoming in the art.
As to contemporary crayonstone work, its most usual fault grows out of our habits acquired with other materials. We are too much suckled on types of drawings done in thousands, adapted to the transient needs of advertising and illustrating.
The independent artist-lithographer should get all these other ideas out of his system: he should operate as purely in his own medium as do the etcher and the painter. Crayonstone happily enables him to lay aside haste, worry about editors, going to press, or the restrictions of any reproductive process. If he is brilliant, the stone will scintillate with him. If he is thoughtful, it will graciously encourage his most beautiful dream. If it is in him to make a real work of art, let him make it. Never will a better opportunity knock at his door than when holding a perfect crayon, he faces a perfect stone.
And yet, no one can do either himself or his medium justice the first time he tries, or the second. Interesting, even valuable things, if you will; but man may not be master anywhere without paying the price. And the price here is the loving labor necessary to bring about that intimate familiarity without which there is no master, only an experimenter.
EDGE OF THE WOODS
Size: 14 × 10 inches.
Serial number of gone: 248.
Stone grained with carborundum, Grade F.
Crayon number: 300; made thus:
| Stearine | 820 grains |
| White wax | 230 grains |
| Carnauba wax | 230 grains |
| Babbitt’s Concentrated Lye (saturated solution). | 120 drops |
Notes made at the time say: “The day was very warm but the crayon worked perfectly and the stone did not spread. Rolled up on the crayon.”
Etch not given; probably about 1–48.