Hand stencils were made by Cave men by blowing natural colored pigment over a hand held against a wall
stencil
Ancient Chinese used seals to stamp over melted wax. The seals had religious purposes, used as healing devices by impressing therapeutic characters onto the flesh of sick people.
seals
Printing Woodblock printing, also known as xylography today is the first ever recorded method of printing. It became widely used for paper and textile printing. It uses engraved woodblock blocks.
woodblock
Metal movable type appeared in the late Japanese era. It was used to print banknotes and official documents. Copper-block print has square holes for embedding movable characters such that each printed paper money had a different combination of markers for preventing counterfeit.
Metal-block Movable Printing
A printing press is a mechanical devise applying pressure to an inked surface thereby transferring an image.
Flat-bed Printing Press
Invented by a Bavarian author, it is a method on printing on a smooth surface. It uses a chemical process to create image. There is a positive image to which the ink clings to and the clean side becomes the negative.
Lithography
Screen printing has its origins in simple stenciling by the Japanese,
Screen Printing
is a method of transferring a pattern by brushing, spraying, squeezing ink or paint through the open areas of a stencil.
Stencil printing
produces an image or pattern by applying pigment to a surface over an object with designed gaps. It creates the pattern or image by only allowing the pigment to reach some parts of the surface.
Stenciling
is an instrument with a design created in it, in the form of design gaps. The gaps that are crafted normally allows pigment pass through.