Resist Techniques

A resist, used in many areas of manufacturing and art, is something that is added to parts of an object to create a pattern by protecting these parts from being affected by a subsequent stage in the process. Often the resist is then removed. For example in the resist dyeing of textiles, wax or a similar substance is added to places where the dye is not wanted. The wax will “resist” the dye, and after it is removed there will be a pattern in two colours. Batik, shibori and tie-dye are among many styles of resist dyeing.

Resist-dyeing is a widely used method of applying colours or patterns to fabric. A substance that is impervious to the dye blocks its access to certain areas of the fabric, while other parts are free to take up the dye colour. Tie-dyeing involves pinching areas of cloth and tying them tightly with thread before dyeing. Removal of the thread reveals small circular marks in the original fabric colour. Complex patterns can be built up by repeating the process using another dye colour. In applied resist-dyeing, the pattern is marked on to the cloth with a substance such as paste or wax. After dyeing and removal of the resist substance, the pattern is revealed in the original fabric colour. This process can be repeated several times.

Applied resist technique is called ‘tsutsugaki’ in Japan where rice paste is used as the resist, and ‘batik’ in Java where wax is used. Originally the hot wax was applied with a shaped strip of bamboo, but in the 17th century the invention of the ‘canting’ (pronounced janting) – a copper crucible with spouts of different sizes – meant that the wax could more easily be applied in continuous lines of varying thicknesses, thus improving the fineness of the patterns that could be attempted.

Wax or grease can also be used as a resist in pottery, to keep some areas free from a ceramic glaze; the wax burns away when the piece is fired. Song dynasty Jizhou ware used paper cut-outs and leaves as resists or stencils under glaze to create patterns. Other uses of resists in pottery work with slip or paints, and a whole range of modern materials used as resists. A range of similar techniques can be used in watercolour and other forms of painting. While these artistic techniques stretch back centuries, a range of new applications of the resist principle have recently developed in microelectronics and nanotechnology. An example is resists in semiconductor fabrication, using photoresists (often just referred to as “resists”) in photolithography.

Etching processes use a resist, though in these typically the whole object is covered in the resist (called the “ground” in some contexts), which is then selectively removed from some parts. This is the case when a resist is used to prepare the copper substrate for champlevé enamels, where parts of the field are etched (with acid or electrically) into hollows to be filled with powdered glass, which is then melted. In chemical milling, as many forms of industrial etching are called, the resist may be referred to as the “maskant”, and in many contexts the process may be known as masking. A fixed resist pre-shaped with the pattern is often called a stencil, or in some contexts a frisket.

The earliest batiks were monochrome patterns against an indigo background, but multicoloured ones were produced from the 18th century onwards using methods learnt from expert Muslim dyers in India. Typical patterns represented ancient symbolic designs in complex, symmetrical, intertwining layouts, and reflected the social class of the owner through their level of intricacy. Some of the ceremonial garments produced and decorated in this way are amongst the most superb examples of textile ornamentation known.

In India, beeswax resist was used for part of the fabric colouring process in the production of chintz. Pouncing was used to transfer the pattern in charcoal onto the cotton cloth; a porous bag of loose charcoal powder called a ‘pounce’ was dusted over a design pricked out onto paper. Then the hot wax was drawn on with a reed pen, following the charcoal guidelines. The textile workers were largely low-caste Hindi family groups, each family skilled in a separate stage of the complex chintz-making process and working in their own small craft workshops (not their own homes). The fabric moved from family to family for each of the many stages ‘appearing, like a snail, to make no progress’ until the cloth was complete, as a Dutch agent recorded in the 1680s.

The Oxford English Dictionary does not record the word “resist” in this sense before the 1830s, when it was used in relation to both “calico-printing” (1836) and metalwork with copper (1839). Resists were also used to etch steel from the mid 19th-century.