Intaglio printing is a pain in the ass. I think we all know it.
It’s technical, it’s time consuming, and it brutally tests your patience and precision every single time.
But here’s the truth. Once you find out what intaglio printing can do, you won’t want to focus on any other type of printing.
There’s a reason artists and purists keep coming back to it, even when easier options are everywhere.
Let me break down why this ancient method still holds up. And why I keep choosing it.
Maybe, you’ll be able to resonate with one of my reasons.
Unmatched Detail and Precision
If you’re someone who gets giddy over intricate linework and microscopic precision (guilty), intaglio is a dream. No modern printing method I’ve tried comes close to the control intaglio gives you.
Etching and graving are not just decorative techniques. They let you carve depth, shading, texture, and movement in ways that feel almost, for a lack of a better word, alive.
That’s why it’s still the gold standard for printing where detail is non-negotiable. Think currency, passports, high-security documents. Those impossibly crisp lines and subtle grooves? That’s intaglio at work.
And do not forget that it’s nearly impossible to forge. The plate tells the truth. Every line is earned.
Tactile Beauty You Can Feel (But First You Bleed for It)
Getting that raised, velvety impression that makes intaglio prints so mesmerizing isn’t easy. You’ve to go through hell to get that.
Anyone who’s actually run a plate knows what I’m talking about. That crisp emboss, that pressure-borne texture everyone raves about? It doesn’t just appear. It comes from battling variables that never play nice.
First off, there’s paper. It needs to be damp, but not too damp. You over-soak, and it bleeds or buckles. You under-soak, and it won’t pick up the ink at all.
Sometimes, you think you’ve nailed it, until the press tells you otherwise.
Then there’s ink consistency. If it’s too stiff, it won’t push deep into the etched lines. Too loose, and it floods your detail.
And don’t get me started on wiping. It’s an ordeal on its own. Wiping the plate too much makes the plate bare. Wipe it less, then the whole thing prints muddy and lifeless. There’s no shortcut in getting that perfect print. It’s just skill, muscle memory, and failure in my opinion.
Another thing that catches me off-guard most of the time is the pressure. The pressure that I thought was perfect for one plate is a total disaster for the next. Every pressure behaves differently.
You tweak, you guess, you pull proofs like a lunatic until something finally clicks.
And once the stars do align and the paper peels away just right? You feel it. That subtle relief, that kiss of ink raised against the surface. That’s when the exhaustion melts.
It’s a beauty that you earn it.
Collectors feel it with their fingertips. Artists feel it in their bones. But anyone who’s made it knows that tactile richness doesn’t come easy. It comes from obsession.
And some days, obsession is all you’ve got.
Durability Isn’t Automatic—You Have to Build It
People love to say, “Intaglio prints last for centuries.” Sure they do, unless you earn it.
Durability in intaglio isn’t just about using good materials. It’s about discipline, control, and decisions that come back to haunt you if you get lazy.
You want a print to outlive you? Then everything, I mean literally everything, matters.
Let’s start with paper. Most beginners think any thick cotton rag will do. But not all papers age the same. Some yellow, some crumble, some warp with time.
You’ve got to test how that paper dries, how it stretches under pressure, how it reacts to your specific ink. I’ve had prints that looked great for a week and then turned brittle within a year.
Then there’s plate corrosion, which is a silent killer. If you’re using copper or zinc, you better clean and store those plates like they’re sacred.
One tiny fingerprint left after printing, and you’ll find it oxidizing like a rusted bike in six months. That’s not just a cosmetic flaw. It affects your future pulls and ruins consistency. I’ve ruined editions that way. And yeah, I still think about them.
Now let’s talk about inks. A lot of new printers get seduced by color and forget longevity.
Some pigments fade fast under UV, some react poorly with paper sizing, and others never fully cure.
I’ve spent years hunting for the right black. Not the darkest black, but the black that still looks black 50 years later.
Now think about the wiping process. Wipe too aggressively and you’re thinning out the ink deposit, compromising richness over time. Wipe unevenly, and you’ll end up with micro-fade zones that age differently across the same piece. It’s not obvious at first, but give it five years in the sun and your mistakes will scream.
Drying is its own battlefield. If your studio is too humid, the print might never cure right. Too dry, and you risk hairline cracks from paper shrinkage.
And let me tell you that there’s nothing more painful than pulling a perfect print, only to watch it curl like a dying leaf two weeks later because you rushed the drying.
I also learned, albeit painfully, that you can’t cheap out on archival handling. I once stored a portfolio in what I thought was an acid-free board.
Six months later, every single piece had faint ghosting from the backing material. Durability isn’t just what happens on the press bed. It’s how you treat the print after it’s born.
And here’s something nobody talks about, which is emotional durability. The piece has to be good enough to deserve to be preserved.
Some of my earliest prints didn’t fall apart. But they had no soul. Nobody wanted to frame them. Nobody wanted to protect them. They just existed. So they faded into nothing, not because the materials failed, but because the work didn’t earn the effort to last.
So yeah, intaglio can last hundreds of years. But it’s not a promise. It’s a challenge.
Every step you take either protects your work or poisons it in slow motion. The permanence people admire in museum prints? That came from craft, paranoia, and obsession.
If you want your print to live forever, you can’t just make art. But if you don’t want to make art, then you can’t print. Do you understand the irony?
Well, let’s move onto the next reason why people stick with intaglio printing despite it being a nightmare.
Making It Personal Isn’t As Easy As It Sounds
They say your art should feel like it came from you. But they don’t tell you how exhausting that actually is.
It’s one thing to pull a clean print. It’s another to make it feel like it carries something of you, something only you could’ve made. That part? That’s the part that gets in your head.
I’ve sat at the bench with plates that looked technically perfect. But they felt hollow. Cold. Dead. Like I was just imitating someone else’s work and hoping nobody noticed.
There were weeks where I inked and wiped like a machine, trying to force something “meaningful” into the paper. But the truth is, you can’t fake personal. You have to mean it. And meaning something is harder than any etch or wipe.
Eventually, I stopped trying to make some grand emotional statement and just reached for something simple, something I actually cared about.
That’s when I started thinking like a writer again. I remembered this one line that had stuck with me for days from a page I’d bookmarked. One of these Enemies to Lovers writing prompts.
It wasn’t profound in a literary sense, but it was honest. It had heat. Tension. That unspoken kind of emotional violence that sits between two characters who shouldn’t love each other but do anyway.
So I etched it into a small plate. No big monologue. Just a line. Just enough to make me flinch when I read it.
The first time I printed it, I didn’t even care how perfect the lines were. For once, I wasn’t chasing technical success. I was chasing honesty.
Now that print hangs next to my bench. Not because it’s beautiful, but because it’s mine.
Because I remember the feeling that lived inside that sentence. And every time I see it, it reminds me that sometimes the most personal touch you can give your art is to stop performing and just put your voice on the plate.
That plate on the bench is my north star. It tells me to be “you” than to be “perfect”. Ultimately, art is an extension of the creator.
And that’s why intaglio printing draws the “raw” ones so much because they want to inject themselves in the plates. Despite all the ordeal, it’s worth it.
Why Purists Still Worship It
There’s a type of artist who just doesn’t want fast results. If you’re one of them, then you’re looking for a process, a ritual, and most importantly, you want mastery.
Intaglio demands that.
Nothing is rushed in intaglio printing. Everything, every step, needs your full attention. And it doesn’t matter if you’re engraving, wiping, pressing, or inking. You just can’t sleepwalk through it.
And because of that, every print is infused with you. Your skill, your mood, your flaws, your fingerprints.
In a world that worships speed and perfection, intaglio is slow and honest. And people notice.
So, What Do I Think?
I think intaglio printing is for people who are a bit masochistic. It takes a bit of likeness for the suffering that one has to go through to create these printings.
And people who love this printing art form are the ones who’re in a way perfectionists, but they’re not. They love the infusion of their soul and the overall texture and feel that this type of printing provide.
To know more about the origins of intaglio printing’s origin, you can check my post here.