How Baseball Cards Were Made in the 19th Century

[steve B]

Originally Posted by mouschi

There is a publication named "Prang's Prize Babies - How this picture is made." Here is a link to show the steps: https://gigi.mwa.org/netpub/server.n...ing=1&offset=0 - it shows there being 19 colors ... and in the text that they have even used 45 stones to create one lithograph. I always thought it was 4 or so. I'd love to know how many were used for the cards. As for the term "shade", I know I read it somewhere, but cannot place it. The link above does help illustrate how cumbersome it must have been.

Great post!

They used as many colors as they needed, or as many as the customer would pay for. Many areas were patches of solid color. The dots similar to our modern halftones were done by hand, so the person doing that had a lot of control over the way it looked. Dark brown fading to light could be simply light brown with a tighter then looser pattern of dots that got smaller and farther apart. Or it could be Something similar over 2-4 patches of brown that get lighter.

You can usually pick out the colors looking with a good magnifier.

Most stuff I see was 6-8 colors, maybe a bit more or a bit less. (I sort of collect tradecards too) 45 would be a piece made to show off what the printer could do. Keeping that many colors all in registration was work for a real master. I don't think the art places still doing lithography that way even get close to that.