The central Presbyterian. [volume] (Richmond, Va.) 1856-1908, 1872-06-12
C E N T r A
How ChrOmOs are Made.

There's no excuse for bare gloomy walls
nowadays. Every cottage, and almost every
shanty can afford some lively, bright colored
picture, that will comfort and brighten the
lives lived out there.
Thanks to wonderful new way of max
ing pictures, you can buy as pretty pic
ture for five dollars as you could few years
ago for five hundred. In fact, you can buy
a copy of the five hundred dollar picture SO
exact and perfect that you can't tell the dit
ference, and even an artistic has to look
sharp.
The works 1 speak of are chromos, and
the reason they are cheap is just because of
one little circumstance-th grease and wa
ter won't mix. 1t seems rather funny that
a simple thing like that should be the. cause
of such wonderful effect, but I'll tell you
how it is.
What makes an oil painting expensive is,
that the artist spends years in learning to
paint, and then weeks and months on each
picture. Every line and dot and shade is
the work of his fine brush, and there are two
or three coats of paint over every part OF
the picture. The chrome is very different.
1t is not painted, but printed from stone
plates. The first thing, in making one, is
to prepare as many of these plates as there
are colors and shades of color in the picture
The stone is of peculiar kind, which likes,
or absorbs, both grease and water. 1t is
sawed into plates, and polished by rubbing
with sand and We S'2 shey are not
smooth enough. The sand is washed off, and
they are again polished with fine pumice stone,
till you can see your face in them. They are
then examined with microscope, to see that
there are no tiny holes, for one would spoil
the picture.
When perfectly smooth, they are set up
slanting, in frames, and the artist goes to
work. On the first stone he draws, with a
sharp pencil of sort of chalk, every part of
the picture that is to be of one color.
Suppose he wants to make picture of a
girl With brown hair and eyes, red cheeks
and lips, and blue dress. He will need four
stones. On the first he will draw with his
pencil, every part that is to be flesh color,
face and hands, being careful not to touch a
finger to the polished stone, for the the least
finger mark would injure it,
On the second stone he would draw the
red lips and cheeks; on the third the brown
eyes and hair, and on the fourth the blue
dress.
The chalk pencil is greasy, you know, and
so every line of the picture is drawn in
grease on the four stones.
Now comes man who washes off the
stones. The water soaks in everywhere ex-
cept where the grease lines are-water can't
soak into grease.
The next man takes sponge and coolly
washes out the chalk lines, so that the stones
look entirely clean; but though he washed
off the chalk, the grease, which soaked into
the stone, is still there as firmly as ever.
The next man pours gum water over it,
to stop up the pores of the stone. 1t does
this nicely except where the sturdy little
grease marks are, and there it can't get in.
Now comes the colori1g: over the first
stone is run roller ,ered with flesh color
ed paint. Oil paint is greasy, of course, so
where the gum-water is, the paint won
stick, but on every line of grease it leaV
its mark. Over the second stone goes
roller of red paint, leaving a pair Of
| lips and cheeks an the stone. OK
third a brown roller, to color the eye
the hair and over the fourth blue II
for the dress.
Now all that needs to be done is to pr
on the same sheet of paper an impressic
from each of these stones. The first stone
prints in oil paint, fair complexion and a
pair of hands; the second pair of lips
and so on through the whole four.
Imagine how careful they must be to have
them match each other. If they did not, the
girls eyes might be planted in the middle of
her cheeks, in a very unpleasant way; or
her hair an inch or two above her head, as
though she'd been scalped by an Indian.
Most pictures have more than four
tints. Not only every color but every
shade has separate stone. Ordinary pic
lures have from fifteen to twenty-fv stones
employed, yet the lines are all soft, and the
eolors shade into each other like the origi-
nal painting.
Our best chromos even initiate the threads
of the canvass, so that one must look on the
wrong side to see if it be oil painting or
chrome.
For those who don't care to look on the
wrong side of things they're just as beauti-
full as the expensive original