Monday Methods: The Brayer

A selection of brayers

For most of our Monday Methods, the topic of choice has been a bookbinding tool, from bone folders to sewing keys. This Thursday, we're going to discuss an important term for printmaking: the brayer.

The brayer, as seen above, is a hand roller used to spread ink onto a glass plate or ink table. Brayers can be made from a variety of different materials: rubber, sponge, acrylic, polyurethane, or even leather. Certain materials are used for different methods of printing. For example, rubber brayers (which come in various levels of hardness) are used most often for relief printing. Leather rollers can be used in lithography, while sponge rollers are used primarily for paint. This roller is than mounted on a spindle rod or pin which is attached to a  handle. Larger brayers sometimes use metal, while the larger ones even have double handles in order to apply maximum pressure.

The brayer is most often used in transferring ink to a printing matrix. Ink is laid out on a palette, and the brayer is rolled into the pool of ink, and then repeatedly rolled in one direction until the ink is evenly distributed. The brayer is then rolled across the surface to be printed, transferring ink onto the raised areas before paper is run through the press and the ink is transferred to the paper.

Brayers are particularly useful when inking an image or text form that requires more than one color. For example, instead of coating a plate with black ink, printing, and coating another section with red ink and printing on top of the original, one plate can be inked with multiple colors. Using small brayers to ink up multiple sections of an image or block of text can allow this whole process to be complete in one run!

 -Christina Squitieri

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