Drypoint is a way of making prints by scratching lines directly into a metal plate, most often copper, with a sharp needle. The needle removes nothing. It shoves the copper aside.
The displaced metal piles up along each line in a ragged ridge, called the burr, much as soil piles up beside a plowed furrow. When the plate is inked, the burr holds extra ink, and the printed line comes out dark and soft, with slightly blurred edges.
The name says what the method does without. The plate stays "dry" because no acid ever touches it, and the "point" is the needle, made of steel or tipped with a diamond.
This is what sets drypoint apart from etching, its closest relative. An etcher covers the copper with a waxy coating, draws through it with a needle, and then lowers the plate into an acid bath that eats the lines into the metal.
Engraving, the third member of the family, needs neither coating nor bath. The engraver pushes a burin across the copper, a short steel rod whose tip is ground to a diamond shape, and the line it cuts prints crisp and even.
A drypoint line looks furry by comparison. Its edge is soft like velvet, because the burr catches ink along its whole length.
Printing a drypoint follows the same steps as printing an engraving or an etching. The artist dabs ink over the plate so that it sinks into every line, then wipes the flat surface with a cloth.
The cloth cleans the polished copper but cannot reach down into the grooves, so ink stays only in the lines and along the burr. A sheet of damp paper goes on top, and both pass between the heavy rollers of a press, which push the paper down into the lines to pick up the ink.
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A burr that wears out
The burr that gives drypoint its dark line is also fragile, and it does not last long under the press. The Dutch painter Rembrandt, who pushed the technique further than anyone before him, ran into that problem in 1653, on a Crucifixion that survives in two very different versions.
What You'll Discover
Why Rembrandt printed on vellum.
What Rembrandt did with a worn plate.
Who tried drypoint before him.
What Degas said about Mary Cassatt.
How a coat of steel saved the burr.