Combining intaglio printing with painting

Combining intaglio printing with painting, inspired by Howard Hodgkin 

I recently went to see the exhibition of Howard Hodgkins prints at Pitzhanger Gallery in Ealing. (Still on, but you’d better be quick as it ends on 9th March 2026.)

Howard Hodgkin is one on my favourite painters and printmakers, and I was very excited to see this exhibition which focussed on his printmaking, with 16 of his enormous intaglio/painted prints on display.

Intaglio prints with a layer of gouache paint

From a technical point of view the aspect that really captivated me, was to see close up how he mixed intaglio prints with sweeping brushed and splashed gouache paint. Somehow it still feels daring and slightly naughty to take a loaded brush full of paint and swipe it over a print. Also very liberating.

When I see his work I often feel that I have been in a dark room and someone has just opened the curtains and let the sunlight stream in, both literally and metaphorically, and this exhibition really brought this feeling home.

It was wonderful to be able to spend a long time there, in the beautiful quiet and almost empty gallery, just absorbing the enormous prints, some stretching over a grid of 12 sheets of paper. We could also go right up to them, which I did in true printmaker fashion, examining them forensically to see how they were constructed, and took some photos to show you. 

A handy tip for evaluating your prints

Carborundum prints as a starting point

Most of the intaglio plates for these prints were made with carborundum, blobbed and splashed on, or painted with big brushes.

“I knew Jack Shirreff from teaching at Corsham [Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, Wiltshire], where he taught print making. And in the eighties I still had a house in Wiltshire.
Jack was around the corner. The first print I made with Jack was in 1986, Green Room. I liked the way Jack did the hand colouring. At the time it was anathema to most printers.
There followed Blue and Red Listening Ear in the same year. That’s when Jack introduced me to the delights of carborundum, its ups and downs, in fact. It’s a hard substance that’s ground down and mixed into a paste. When it’s painted on to the printing plate, it makes a hill, which forces a valley into the surface of the paper.”

extract from Howard Hodgkin; ‘Printmaking at 107 Workshop’

As well as photos I took at the exhibition, I have also included some images of prints from the Howard Hodgkin website which show many more variations and ways of combining painting and printing.

Same intaglio plate with variations in colour and painting

The two prints shown below are part of a larger series ‘For Alan’. The same intaglio plate is inked in a different colour, and with a unique painted layer added.

Here are details of ‘Venice Night’ showing the effects of white paint over the dark intaglio carborundum print.

Same intaglio plate re-used in a different way

Look closely at the two prints below; what do you notice?
The purple intaglio print is from the same plate but turned through 180 degrees. The painting transforms it into a completely different image.

Close ups of paint on prints

Howard Hodgkin often used gouache over his intaglio prints, this is water based and opaque, so the inky substrate resisted the the paint in places.

Some prints have translucent inks painted over them, creating more layers of colour.

I know many printmakers add a watercolour wash, touching up areas, or some ‘hand tinting’ to introduce areas of colour to a print, this feels like an addition which is secondary to the original print. Whereas Howard Hodgkin’s confident approach with opaque gouache and transparent drawing inks radically alters the original print, adding layers of meaning and depth to the intaglio printed base. 

Now I want to explore the idea of adding paint to individual original prints as an integral aspect of intaglio printing. The idea feels exciting, but at the same time quite daunting.

I’d be interested to know if you have worked in this way? What happened? How did it feel?

Please do share your thoughts, and if you have images of your own work combining intaglio printing with over-painting it would be great to see some images ( use the comments section below)