When you print a boarding pass from your phone, you're using technology that's fundamentally reshaping one of humanity's oldest art forms. Printmaking—the craft of creating multiple copies of an image—has traveled from ancient Chinese woodblocks to Renaissance etchings to something that would baffle Rembrandt: artists drawing on iPads and sending files to machines that spray microscopic ink droplets with surgical precision.

The Long Road from Woodblocks to Wireless

Printmaking didn't start as art. It started as necessity. After the Chinese invented paper in 105 AD, they developed relief printing around 200 AD to copy Buddhist scriptures. Carve an image into wood, ink it, press it onto paper. Simple. Revolutionary.

By 1040 AD, the Chinese had moveable type—individual characters that could be rearranged and reused. Gutenberg gets the credit in Western history books for his 1450 printing press, but he arrived four centuries late to the party. Still, his timing mattered. The Renaissance was hungry for images, and intaglio processes—engraving, etching, drypoint—let artists scratch designs into metal plates and spread their styles across Europe.

The accidental discoveries came next. In 1796, German playwright Alois Senefelder was experimenting with greasy crayon on limestone when he stumbled onto lithography. Draw on stone with grease, wet the stone, apply ink. The ink sticks to the grease and rejects the water. Press paper onto it. Magic that became the backbone of 19th-century commercial printing.

Then came the industrial era's happy accidents. In 1904, American printer Ira Washington Rubel accidentally printed onto a rubber roller instead of paper. The image transferred beautifully to the next sheet. Offset printing was born. Richard March Hoe's 1843 rotary press had already revolutionized newspapers by using continuous paper rolls rather than individual sheets. Printing was becoming faster, cheaper, more ubiquitous.

When Electricity Met Ink

The digital revolution crept in quietly. Chester Carlson invented electrophotography in 1938—using directed ion beams on rotating drums to create images. It didn't look like art. It looked like office equipment. By 1977, the fastest photocopiers were running. By 1985, office laser printers were everywhere, delivering quality that made traditional print shops nervous.

The real earthquake hit around 1990. Small print shops with digital printers and desktop publishing software started competing with established printing labs. Suddenly, producing high-quality prints didn't require a warehouse full of equipment and decades of specialized training. A computer, software, and a decent printer could do the job.

By 2010, digital printing had become one of the world's dominant printing processes. Traditional methods weren't extinct, but they were struggling. Digital was faster, cheaper, and often better quality. The craft that had defined printmaking for two millennia was being replaced by machines that spoke in pixels.

The New Tools of the Trade

Modern digital printmaking comes in several flavors, each with passionate defenders. Giclée printing—a French term meaning "to spray"—uses twelve cartridges of archival pigment ink instead of the eight in standard inkjet printers. Those extra colors create prints that last longer and capture subtler tonal variations. Collectors pay more for giclée prints because the inks won't fade for generations.

Standard inkjet printing uses print heads with microscopic holes that spray tiny droplets onto paper. There's debate about whether inkjet or giclée captures better detail. Some experts argue inkjet excels at shadow detail despite giclée's archival advantages. The differences matter to artists and collectors haggling over editions worth thousands of dollars.

Dye sublimation works differently. It heats solid ink until it vaporizes into gas, which then permeates synthetic fabric fibers. The result looks spectacular on textiles—brilliant colors that won't crack or peel. Fashion designers and interior decorators love it.

And then there's 3D printing, which abandons ink entirely for layers of plastic or resin. It's not printmaking in the traditional sense, but it's expanding what "making multiples" means. Artists are creating sculptural editions that would have been impossible before.

The Art World's Identity Crisis

Here's where things get contentious. Museums are buying digital art. The Museum of Modern Art has even sold pieces from its collection to make room for digital acquisitions. Major artists are creating digital editions. Yet walk through the International Fine Print Dealers Association fair—held last October at New York's Javits Center—and you'll struggle to find digital work.

Art historian Susan Tallman pinpointed the problem: print collectors see digital prints as "a less-serious medium connoting mass reproduction and therefore not financially viable." They're dismissed as "reproductions" even though all printmaking except monoprints involves reproduction. A Rembrandt etching exists in multiple copies, but nobody calls those reproductions.

The resistance is partly philosophical, partly financial. Traditional printmaking requires physical mastery. You learn to handle acids, inks, papers, and presses. You develop calluses. Digital printmaking happens on screens. The physical skill shifts to color management and file preparation—less romantic, perhaps, but no less demanding.

Allan McCollum's 2020 piece "For The Millions / Just For You" illustrates the new possibilities. He creates unique shapes in Adobe Illustrator through painstaking cut-and-paste work, tracking each silhouette to avoid repetition. The shapes exist as vector files—mathematical descriptions of curves and lines. Those files can drive routers, laser cutters, or waterjet cutters to create objects from wood, plastic, metal, or stone. Or they can be printed as archival pigment prints, 37 5/8 by 25 5/16 inches, edition of 50.

What is that work? Digital art? Printmaking? Sculpture? All three? The categories are dissolving.

Old Rules for New Methods

Despite the technological shift, many digital artists observe traditional printmaking protocols with almost religious devotion. They make test strips and proofs. They create artist's proofs (APs) and numbered editions. They sign prints or stamp them with a chop mark. They "retire" digital files after completing an edition—the digital equivalent of canceling a printing plate by scratching it.

There's careful paper handling: wafting sheets to separate them, interleaving with tissue, cataloging, proper storage. The rituals persist because they signal seriousness. They say: this is art, not just output.

Tribeca Printworks defines giclée and iris prints as "archival pigment prints made from a digital file directly to paper using an inkjet printer." That definition sounds technical, but it's establishing legitimacy. Naming matters. "Inkjet print" sounds cheap. "Archival pigment print" sounds valuable.

Some artists bridge both worlds. Matt Saunders, a Harvard professor, collaborates with Niels Borch Jensen's Copenhagen printshop on large-scale experimental photogravures and copper plate etchings. John Baldessari made photogravures with aquatint. Jasper Johns created photo-based collage lithographs. Robert Rauschenberg worked in intaglio. Ann Hamilton produced photo-based lithographs.

These artists use photography and digital tools, but they route the results through traditional processes. The computer is a sketch pad. The print shop is where art happens. This hybrid approach satisfies collectors who want innovation without abandoning craft.

Where the Market Stands

David Zwirner's Utopia Editions, overseen by Elleree Erdos, represents the contemporary market's approach. At the IFPDA fair, they showed work by Katherine Bernhardt, Raymond Pettibon, and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones—artists who move fluidly between painting, drawing, and printmaking without worrying about medium purity.

Erdos observes that "printmaking and photography seem to be two holdouts to medium-specific categories that have largely been dissolved in both artistic practices and museum departments." Painters don't just paint anymore. Sculptors work digitally. The starting point, she says, is always "what does the artist want to achieve?"

That's the new philosophy. Medium follows vision, not the reverse. If an artist wants soft gradations and archival stability, giclée makes sense. If they want the texture of hand-pulled lithography, traditional methods deliver. If they want to produce 500 identical prints overnight, digital wins.

The market is slowly catching up. Digital prints remain "art's most plentiful editioned media of our age," yet they're underrepresented at major print fairs. The lag reflects collector conservatism more than artistic merit. Younger collectors who grew up with Photoshop and Instagram have fewer hangups about digital legitimacy.

The Environmental and Practical Angles

Digital printing has practical advantages beyond aesthetics. It uses less energy and creates less waste than traditional methods. No acid baths to dispose of, no excess ink to clean up. In an era of climate anxiety, that matters.

Cloud printing adds accessibility. Artists can send files from tablets or smartphones to printers anywhere. A designer in Berlin can produce work at a print shop in Tokyo without shipping physical materials.

There's also a tactile revival happening. Research suggests about 22% of consumers are more likely to buy something after touching it. This drives demand for special finishes—foil stamping, varnishes, embossing—that give digital prints physical presence. The irony is rich: digital technology enabling handcrafted effects.

What's Being Lost and Gained

Something does disappear in the digital transition. The smell of ink and solvents. The resistance of a printing press. The unpredictability of hand-pulled prints where each copy varies slightly. Traditional printmakers develop an intimate relationship with materials that digital artists experience differently.

But new possibilities emerge. Digital tools let artists work at scales impossible before. They enable precision that human hands can't match. They allow experimentation without wasting expensive materials. An artist can try fifty color variations in an hour.

The democratization matters too. A teenager with a laptop and access to a decent printer can learn printmaking techniques that once required apprenticeship. Knowledge that was guild-protected for centuries is now on YouTube.

The Hybrid Future

The evolution of printmaking in digital art isn't a replacement story. It's a complication story. Traditional methods persist, often enhanced by digital preparation. Digital methods mature, incorporating traditional wisdom about paper, color, and editions.

Niels Borch Jensen's Copenhagen printshop, founded in 1979, still does collaborative lithography, serigraphy, and intaglio. But artists bring digital files. They scan drawings, manipulate them on computers, then translate them back into physical processes. The workflow zigzags between old and new.

This hybrid approach may define printmaking's future. Digital tools for creation and experimentation. Traditional processes for final production. Or vice versa. Or both simultaneously. The boundaries are permeable now.

What Defines a Print Anymore?

The fundamental question remains: what makes something a print in 2025? Is it the multiplication? Then 3D-printed sculptures count. Is it the indirect process—creating a matrix that produces copies? Then digital files are matrices. Is it the artist's intent to create an edition? Then the technology doesn't matter.

The art world hasn't settled on answers. Galleries, museums, collectors, and artists each have slightly different definitions. That ambiguity creates both confusion and freedom. Artists can define printmaking through their practice rather than conforming to inherited categories.

Perhaps that's the real evolution. Not just new tools replacing old ones, but a fundamental shift in how we think about multiplicity, originality, and craft. The woodblock carver and the digital artist are both creating multiples. Both are making aesthetic decisions about color, composition, and surface. Both are navigating the tension between uniqueness and reproduction.

The technology changes. The fundamental human impulse—to create an image and share it widely—remains constant. From Buddhist scriptures to Instagram posts, we've always wanted to make copies. Digital tools just make it faster, cheaper, and more accessible. Whether that democratization enriches or dilutes printmaking as an art form depends on who's asking.

What's certain is that printmaking won't fossilize. It never has. Every technological advance—from moveable type to lithography to offset printing—was initially controversial before becoming standard. Digital printmaking is following the same path, slowly earning legitimacy through excellent work by serious artists. The old guard's resistance will fade as new collectors arrive without preconceptions about what counts as "real" printmaking.

The craft survives by evolving. It always has.