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Mezzotint

Mezzotint is a monochrome printmaking process of the intaglio family. It was the first printing process that yielded half-tones without using line- or dot-based techniques like hatching, cross-hatching or stipple. Mezzotint achieves tonality by roughening a metal plate with thousands of little dots made by a metal tool with small teeth, called a "rocker". In printing, the tiny pits in the plate retain the ink when the face of the plate is wiped clean. This technique can achieve a high level of quality and richness in the print, and produce a furniture print which is large and bold enough to be framed and hung effectively in a room.

Mezzotint is often combined with other intaglio techniques, usually etching and engraving, including stipple engraving. The process was especially widely used in England from the eighteenth century, and in France was called la manière anglais (“the English manner”). Until the 20th century it has mostly been used for reproductive prints to reproduce portraits and other paintings, rather than for original compositions. From the mid-18th century it was somewhat in competition with the other main tonal technique of the day, aquatint.

Since the mid-nineteenth century it has been relatively little used, as lithography and other techniques produced comparable results more easily. Sir Frank Short (1857–1945) was an important pioneer of the mezzotint revival in the United Kingdom along with Peter Ilsted (1864–1933) in Denmark.

Mezzotint is known for the luxurious quality of its tones: first, because an evenly, finely roughened surface holds a lot of ink, allowing deep solid colours to be printed; secondly because the process of smoothing the plate with burin, burnisher and scraper allows fine gradations in tone to be developed. The scraper is a triangular ended tool, and the burnisher has a smooth round end – not unlike many spoon handles.

History
The mezzotint printmaking method was invented by the German soldier and amateur artist Ludwig von Siegen (1609–c. 1680). His earliest mezzotint print dates to 1642 and is a portrait of Countess Amalie Elisabeth of Hanau-Münzenberg, regent for her son, and von Siegen's employer. This was made by working from light to dark. The rocker seems to have been invented by Prince Rupert of the Rhine, a famous cavalry commander in the English Civil War, who was the next to use the process, and took it to England.

Sir Peter Lely saw the potential for using it to publicise his portraits, and encouraged a number of Dutch printmakers to come to England. Godfrey Kneller worked closely with John Smith, who is said to have lived in his house for a period; he created about 500 mezzotints, some 300 copies of portrait paintings. In the next century over 400 mezzotints after portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds are known, by various hands.

British mezzotint collecting was a great craze from about 1760 to the Great Crash of 1929, also spreading to America. The main area of collecting was British portraits; hit oil paintings from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition were routinely, and profitably, reproduced in mezzotint throughout this period, and other mezzotinters reproduced older portraits of historical figures, or if necessary, made them up. The favourite period to collect was roughly from 1750 to 1820, the great period of the British portrait. There were two basic styles of collection: some concentrated on making a complete collection of material within a certain scope, while others aimed at perfect condition and quality (which declines in mezzotints after a relatively small number of impressions are taken from a plate), and in collecting the many "proof states" which artists and printers had obligingly provided for them from early on. Leading collectors included William Eaton, 2nd Baron Cheylesmore and the Irishman John Chaloner Smith.

In the first half of the 19th century the "mixed" technique was popular in England, with other intaglio techniques, often used to start a plate off, combined with mezzotint. Mezzotint was also often used for landscapes, being especially suited to rather gloomy British skies and twilights, that were popular subjects in the Victorian Etching Revival.

Continental use of the technique was much less; in the late 17th century Abraham Bloteling was one of a number of Amsterdam printmakers to use it, but in the 18th century only Augsburg (Johann Jacob Haid and Johann Elias Ridinger), Nuremberg and Vienna (Ignaz Unterberger) had schools, led by artists following London styles.

During the 20th century the technique went into decline, in great part because it was so time consuming to rock the plates. Rare proponents include Yozo Hamaguchi, Leonard Marchant and Shirley Jones. Wider interest in learning and using the technique revived after the publication in 1990 of the book The Mezzotint: History and Technique by artist Carol Wax. The Wax book was responsible for a substantial upsurge in the number of artists creating mezzotints in the United States and worldwide.

Light to dark method
The first mezzotints by Ludwig von Siegen were made using the light to dark method. The metal plate was tooled to create indentations and parts of the image that were to stay light in tone were kept smooth. This method was referred to as the 'Additive method'; that is, adding areas of indentations to the plate for the areas of the print that were to appear darker in tone. This technique meant that it was possible to create the image directly by only roughening a blank plate selectively, where the darker parts of the image are to be. By varying the degree of smoothing, mid-tones between black and white can be created, hence the name mezzo-tinto which is Italian for "half-tone" or "half-painted".

Dark to light method
This became the most common method. The whole surface (usually) of a metal, usually copper, plate is roughened evenly, manually with a rocker, or mechanically. If the plate were printed at this point it would show as solid black. The image is then created by selectively burnishing areas of the surface of the metal plate with metal tools; the smoothed parts will print lighter than those areas not smoothed by the burnishing tool. Areas smoothed completely flat will not hold ink at all; such areas will print "white," that is, the colour of the paper without ink. This is called working from "dark to light", or the "subtractive" method. It was first used by Prince Rupert of the Rhine. The all-over roughening does not require huge skill, and was normally done by an apprentice.

Two great advantages of the technique were that it was easier to learn and also much faster than engraving proper, as well as giving a rich range of tones. Mezzotints could be produced very quickly to respond to or depict events or people in the news, and larger sizes of print were relatively easy to produce. This was crucial for what was known at the time as the furniture print, a mezzotint that was large enough and with sufficiently bold tonal contrasts to hold its own framed and hung on the wall of a room. Since mezzotints were far cheaper than paintings, this was a great attraction.

Colour
Jacob Christoph Le Blon (1667-1741) used the dark to light method and invented the three and four-colour mezzotint printing technique by using a separate metal plate for each colour. Le Blon's colour printing method applied the RYB colour model approach whereby red, yellow and blue were used to create a larger range of colour shades. In Coloritto, his book of 1725, Le Blon refers to red, yellow and blue as "primitive" colours and that red and yellow make orange; red and blue, make purple/violet; and blue and yellow make green (Le Blon, 1725, p. 6). A similar process was used in France later in the century by Le Blon's pupil Jacques-Fabien Gautier-Dagoty and his sons; their work included anatomical illustrations for medical books. Other black and white prints were hand-coloured in watercolour, which was especially useful after the plate became worn.

Printing
Printing the finished plate is the same for either method, and follows the normal way for an intaglio plate; the whole surface is inked, the ink is then wiped off the surface to leave ink only in the pits of the still rough areas below the original surface of the plate. The plate is put through a high-pressure printing press next to a sheet of paper, and the process repeated.

Because the pits in the plate are not deep, only a small number of top-quality impressions (copies) can be printed before the quality of the tone starts to degrade as the pressure of the press begins to smooth them out. Perhaps only one or two hundred really good impressions can be taken, although plates were often "refreshed" by further rocker work. In 1832 a writer in Arnold's Library noted:

"...the uncertainty as to the number of impressions this kind of engraving will afford—some plates failing after fifty or even a less number are printed; from two to three hundred are the most that can be taken off, and then it is often necessary to refresh the ground and restore the lights during the progress of the printing.'"

However, if performed by the printer or the artist's apprentice, refreshing the plate was often done to a lower standard. Bamber Gascoigne says of an example he illustrates with before and after details "the dark tones have been clumsily renewed with the roulette; the result is brutal in close-up but will seem adequate when the whole print is viewed at a normal distance".

Standard sizes used in England were known as "“royal,” 24 x 19 in., “large,” 18 x 24 in., “posture,” 14 x 10 in., and “small,” 6 x 4 in", and ready-made frames and albums could be bought to fit these.

Detailed technique
Plates can be mechanically roughened; one way is to rub fine metal filings over the surface with a piece of glass; the finer the filings, the smaller the grain of the surface. Special roughening tools called 'rockers' have been in use since at least the eighteenth century. The method commonly in use today is to use a steel rocker approximately five inches wide, which has between 45 and 120 teeth per inch on the face of a blade in the shape of a shallow arc, with a wooden handle projecting upwards in a T-shape. Rocked steadily from side to side at the correct angle, the rocker will proceed forward creating burrs in the surface of the copper. The plate is then moved – either rotated by a set number of degrees or through 90 degrees according to preference – and then rocked in another pass. This is repeated until the plate is roughened evenly and will print a completely solid tone of black.

Mezzotint engravers by date of birth

 * Ludwig von Siegen – inventor
 * Prince Rupert of the Rhine
 * Wallerant Vaillant (1623–1677, the first professional mezzotinter)
 * John Smith (c. 1652–c. 1742)
 * Jan van der Vaart (c. 1650–1727, Dutchman working in England)
 * Jacob Christoph Le Blon (1667–1741, German, developed colour printing, using different plates)
 * Bernhard Vogel (1683–1737)
 * George White (c. 1684–1732)
 * Jacques Fabien Gautier d'Agoty (1716–1785, French, developed a four-colour mezzotint process)
 * Richard Houston (1721?–1775)
 * James MacArdell (1729?–1765, Irish)
 * Edward Fisher (1730?–1785?, Irish)
 * Johann Jacob Ridinger (1736–1784), youngest son of Johann Elias Ridinger, who worked in mezzotint himself, too
 * David Martin (1737–1797, Scottish)
 * William Pether (c. 1738–1821)
 * Valentine Green (1739–1813)
 * John Dixon (about 1740–1811)
 * Richard Earlom (1743–1822)
 * William Dickinson (1746–1823)
 * John Raphael Smith (1751–1812)
 * John Jones (c.1755–1797)
 * Joseph Grozer (1755–1799)
 * John Young (1755–1825)
 * William Doughty (1757–1782)
 * James Walker (c. 1760–c. 1823, British, moved to Russia)
 * Charles Howard Hodges (1764–1837, English, moved to Amsterdam)
 * William Say (1764–1834)
 * Charles Turner (1774–1857)
 * John Martin (1789–1854)
 * James Bromley (1800–1838)
 * John Sartain (1808–1897, English pioneer of the technique in America)
 * Alexander Hay Ritchie (1822–1895, Scottish, moved to US)
 * Richard Josey (1840–1906), engraver of James McNeill Whistler's Whistler's Mother
 * Sir Frank Short (1857–1945)
 * Peter Ilsted (1861–1933, Danish)
 * T.F. Simon (1877–1942)
 * M. C. Escher (1898–1972)
 * Lynd Ward (1905-1985)
 * Yozo Hamaguchi (1909–2000)
 * Mario Avati (1921–2009)
 * Leonard Marchant (1929-2000)
 * Robert Kipniss (b. 1931)
 * Shirley Jones (b.1934)
 * Toru Iwaya (b. 1936)
 * Holly Downing (b. 1948)
 * Carol Wax (b. 1953)

title: Mezzotint


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Linocut

Linocut, also known as lino print, lino printing or linoleum art, is a printmaking technique, a variant of woodcut in which a sheet of linoleum (sometimes mounted on a wooden block) is used for a relief surface. A design is cut into the linoleum surface with a sharp knife, V-shaped chisel or gouge, with the raised (uncarved) areas representing a reversal (mirror image) of the parts to show printed. The linoleum sheet is inked with a roller (called a brayer), and then impressed onto paper or fabric. The actual printing can be done by hand or with a printing press.

Technique
Since the material being carved has no directional grain and does not tend to split, it is easier to obtain certain artistic effects with lino than with most woods, although the resultant prints lack the often angular grainy character of woodcuts and engravings. Lino is generally diced, much easier to cut than wood, especially when heated, but the pressure of the printing process degrades the plate faster and it is difficult to create larger works due to the material's fragility.

Linocuts can also be achieved by the careful application of art on the surface of the lino. This creates a surface similar to a soft ground etching and these caustic-lino plates can be printed in either a relief, intaglio or a viscosity printing manner.

Colour linocuts can be made by using a different block for each colour as in a woodcut, as the artists of the Grosvenor School frequently did, but, as Pablo Picasso demonstrated, such prints can also be achieved using a single piece of linoleum in what is called the 'reductive' print method. Essentially, after each successive colour is imprinted onto the paper, the artist then cleans the lino plate and cuts away what will not be imprinted for the subsequently applied colour.

Due to ease of use, linocut is widely used in schools to introduce children to the art of printmaking, using it to complete many tasks in the art lesson rather than going straight for the pencil and eraser. Similarly, non-professional artists often cut lino rather than wood for printing. Nevertheless, in the contemporary art world the linocut is an established professional print medium, because of its extensive use by the artists of the Grosvenor School, followed by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

Emergence of the technique in America
In 1911 “linoleum art” was first displayed in New York City by the Czech émigré Vojtěch Preissig. In his publications on linocuts (1926–29) the respected American printmaker, Pedro Joseph de Lemos, simplified the methods for art schools and introduced new techniques for color linocuts, including the printing of the key block first. The first large-scale colour linocuts made by an American artist were created ca. 1943–45 by Walter Inglis Anderson, and exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1949.

Selected artists

 * Josef Albers, German artist
 * Peeter Allik, Estonian artist
 * Valenti Angelo, American printmaker and illustrator
 * Walter Inglis Anderson American artist
 * Sybil Andrews English-Canadian artist
 * Hans Anton Aschenborn, German painter
 * Georg Baselitz, German artist
 * Torsten Billman, Swedish artist
 * Emma Bormann, Austrian printmaker and painter
 * Gail Brodholt, English artist
 * Horace Brodzky, Australian/British artist
 * Angel Botello, Spanish-Puerto Rican artist
 * Margaret Burroughs, American artist
 * Carlos Cortez, American poet and artist
 * David Call, American Deaf artist
 * Stanley Donwood, British artist
 * Yvonne Drewry, English artist
 * Janet Doub Erickson, American printmaker and artist
 * M. C. Escher, Dutch artist
 * Bill Fick, American printmaker and illustrator
 * Folly Cove Designers American design collective
 * Jacques Hnizdovsky, Ukrainian/American artist
 * Helmi Juvonen, American artist
 * William Kermode, Australian illustrator
 * Gaga Kovenchuk, Russian artist
 * Henri Matisse, French painter
 * Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter
 * Cyril Edward Power, English artist
 * Everett Ruess, American painter, printmaker, writer, and poet
 * Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, German printmaker and painter
 * John Shaw, American/Canadian painter and printmaker
 * Irena Sibley, Australian artist, children's book author, and art teacher
 * James Blanding Sloan, American printmaker, educator, and theatrical designer
 * Ethel Spowers, Australian printmaker
 * Ken Sprague, English artist and activist
 * Hannah Tompkins, American artist and printmaker
 * Tom Hazelmyer, American artist
 * Gwen Frostic, American artist, poet, printmaker, writer
 * Vanessa Lubach, British artist, painter, printmaker

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Linocut


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Chine-collé

Chine-collé or chine collé is a printmaking technique in which the image is transferred onto a surface that is bonded onto a heavier support in the printing process. One purpose is to allow the printmaker to print on a much more delicate surface, such as Japanese paper or linen, that pulls finer details off the plate. Another purpose is to provide a background colour behind the image that is different from the surrounding backing sheet.

The final image will depend on the design and ink color of the printed image, the color and opacity of the paper to which the image is directly printed (plus any inclusions such as petals or fibers in that paper), and the color of the backing sheet.

Etymology and history
Chine-collé roughly translates from French chine = China, and collé, meaning glued or pasted. The word chine is used because the thin paper traditionally used in the process was imported to Europe from China, India and/or Japan.

Chine-collé is sometimes mistakenly used to refer to any type of collage.

Methods
In the typical "direct print" method, the plate is inked; thin paper (such as rice paper) is dampened, placed on the inked plate and trimmed to size; paste is applied to the thin paper; and the ensemble (plate plus thin paper with paste) is placed on a dampened backing sheet. This is then run through a printing press. In the pressure of the press, the ink is transferred to the thin paper, and the thin paper is simultaneously adhered to the backing paper. An advantage of this method is that the thin paper will be exactly the desired size, since it is trimmed to size and then quickly affixed in place.

Another way of printing the direct method is to have the thin paper already cut to size before preparing the plate to print. The heavier print paper has been put in the bath and dampened according to the printmaker's preference, then set aside. If the thin paper was painted on, it has been dried and is also set aside, ready. The plate is inked and wiped then placed on the press face up. Thin paste is brushed on the back of the rice paper and it is placed face down on the plate and registered. The paste is put on just enough to coat but not saturate, which dampens the thin paper appropriately. If one tries to brush paste on a damp piece of rice paper, it will tear. The print paper is then placed on top of the pasted side of the thin paper, a sheet of newsprint added on top of the stack, and the felts then covering the stack. It is then run through the press. This process is less tricky to maneuver than the first method, is cleaner, and more accurate in registration.

In the typical "pre-pasted" method, the thin paper (dry) is trimmed to the size of the plate, then paste is applied and allowed to dry. When the printmaker is ready to print, the paper is dampened to activate the paste and placed, paste-side up, on an inked plate. Then, the ensemble (plate plus thin paper with paste) is placed on a dampened backing sheet and run through a press as described above. An advantage of the pre-pasted method is that once dried, the paste-applied papers can be stored indefinitely, just like a lick-and-stick postage stamp. A disadvantage of this method is that because the paper is trimmed dry, the artist must take into account how much in each direction the paper will expand when it is dampened prior to printing.

Paper
Some artists have moved away from precise trimming of a single sheet of paper to the size of the printing plate when using this method. For example, some experiment with pre-cut shapes for a collage effect, or simultaneously adhere multiple overlapping pieces of paper under the printed image.

A more traditional paper choice would be a fine paper made from gampi fiber. Some artists experiment with non-traditional papers, using such things as newspaper, ephemera, dress patterns, and book pages as the sheet to be printed on.

Glue
There is some variation in adhesives used for chine collé. Some artists are reported to use a dusting of flour right before pressing rather than paste. Some have tried using no adhesive at all, simply relying on the high pressure of the printing press and properties of the paper (fibers, sizing) to fuse the papers together similar to paper-making; however, this method may be variable and unreliable. More recently, some artists have turned to adhesives such as PVA glue or gel medium, rather than paste.

In traditional paste-making for Chine-collé, wheat or rice starch is separated from gluten and other elements of wheat or rice flour. Pure starch is then cooked with distilled water to form a congealed gel. Finally the gel is passed through a fine sieve such as a piece of silk to form the paste. Starch-based pastes are considered archival, and are sometimes used in other paper-based applications, such as book binding, book repair and collage.

title: Chine-collé


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Monotyping

Monotyping is a type of printmaking made by drawing or painting on a smooth, non-absorbent surface. The surface, or matrix, was historically a copper etching plate, but in contemporary work it can vary from zinc or glass to acrylic glass. The image is then transferred onto a paper by pressing the two together, using a printing-press, brayer, baren or by techniques such as rubbing with the back of a wooden spoon or the fingers which allow pressure to be controlled selectively. Monotypes can also be created by inking an entire surface and then, using brushes or rags, removing ink to create a subtractive image, e.g. creating lights from a field of opaque colour. The inks used may be oil or water-based. With oil-based inks, the paper may be dry, in which case the image has more contrast, or the paper may be damp, in which case the image has a 10 percent greater range of tones.

Monotyping produces a unique print, or monotype; most of the ink is removed during the initial pressing. Although subsequent reprintings are sometimes possible, they differ greatly from the first print and are generally considered inferior. These prints from the original plate are called "ghost prints." A print made by pressing a new print onto another surface, effectively making the print into a plate, is called a "cognate". Stencils, watercolor, solvents, brushes, and other tools are often used to embellish a monotype print. Monotypes can be spontaneously executed and with no previous sketch.

History
There is still no certainty as to who was the inventor of the monotype process. The Italian artist Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609–64) is often credited as being the first artist to produce monotypes. He made brushed sketches intended as finished and final works of art. He began to make monotypes in the mid 1640s, normally working from black to white, and produced over twenty surviving ones, over half of which are set at night. It is believed that the Flemish artist Antoon Sallaert created his first monotypes in the early 1640s and is therefore to be regarded as the inventor of this printing process. Both artists used the new technique in different ways. Castiglione created most of his monotypes as black-field images by wiping away ink on a prepared plate thus producing white and grey lines. Sallaert, on the other hand, brushed bold, tapering lines onto the printing surface with meticulous precision. It is likely that Sallaert's monotype style was influenced by the chiaroscuro woodcuts of the Dutch engraver Hendrik Goltzius. Sallaert found in the monotype a technique which was the closest to drawing and oil sketching. His monotypes and drawings are characterised by swelling lines and tapering ends. He often added by hand white highlights to his monotypes. Sallaert clearly appreciated in the monotype technique the freedom to design on a plate before printing it on paper.

William Blake developed a different technique, painting on millboard in egg tempera to produce both new works and coloured impressions of his prints and book illustrations, including his Pity. Each impression was usually then worked over by hand, using ink and watercolour. Few other artists used the technique until Degas, who made several, often working on them further after printing (Beside the Sea, 1876-7); Pissarro also made several. Paul Gauguin used a variant technique involving tracing, later taken up by Paul Klee. In the twentieth century the technique became more popular; examples include the extraordinary colorful monotypes created by Marc Chagall in the 1960s. Twenty-first century examples include works by Nicole Eisenman, Christopher Wool, Karen LaMonte, and Roman Turovsky.

Comparing monotypes to monoprints
Historically, the terms monotype and monoprint were often used interchangeably. More recently, however, they have come to refer to two different, though similar, types of printmaking. Both involve the transfer of ink from a plate to the paper, canvas, or other surface that will ultimately hold the work of art. In the case of monotypes, the plate is a featureless plate. It contains no features that will impart any definition to successive prints. The most common feature would be the etched or engraved line on a metal plate. In the absence of any permanent features on the surface of the plate, all articulation of imagery is dependent on one unique inking, resulting in one unique print. Additionally, the term monotype is often used for an image made by inking a non-absorbent surface with a solid colour, laying over it a piece of paper and drawing onto the back of the paper. When the paper is pulled off the resulting print consists of the line surrounded by ink picked up from the inked plate. The result has a chance element, often random and irregular which gives the print a certain charm, a technique famously used by British artist Tracey Emin, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, where the practice of monoprinting in general was regarded as "fake painting".

Monoprints, on the other hand, now refers to the results of plates that have permanent features on them. Monoprints can be thought of as variations on a theme, with the theme resulting from some permanent features being found on the plate—lines, textures—that persist from print to print. Variations are confined to those resulting from how the plate is inked prior to each print. The variations are endless, but certain permanent features on the plate will tend to persist from one print to the next.

title: Monotyping


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Drypoint

Drypoint is a printmaking technique of the intaglio family, in which an image is incised into a plate (or "matrix") with a hard-pointed "needle" of sharp metal or diamond point. In principle, the method is practically identical to engraving. The difference is in the use of tools, and that the raised ridge along the furrow is not scraped or filed away as in engraving. Traditionally the plate was copper, but now acetate, zinc, or plexiglas are also commonly used. Like etching, drypoint is easier to master than engraving for an artist trained in drawing because the technique of using the needle is closer to using a pencil than the engraver's burin.

The term is also used for inkless scratched inscriptions, such as glosses in manuscripts.

Lines and burrs
The lines produced by printing a drypoint are formed by the burr thrown up at the edge of the incised lines, in addition to the depressions formed in the surface of the plate. A larger burr, formed by a steep angle of the tool, will hold a lot of ink, producing a characteristically soft, dense line that differentiates drypoint from other intaglio methods such as etching or engraving which produce a smooth, hard-edged line. The size or characteristics of the burr usually depend not on how much pressure is applied, but on the angle of the needle. A perpendicular angle will leave little to no burr, while the smaller the angle gets to either side, the larger the burr pileup. The deepest drypoint lines leave enough burr on either side of them that they prevent the paper from pushing down into the center of the stroke, creating a feathery black line with a fine, white center. A lighter line may have no burr at all, creating a very fine line in the final print by holding very little ink. This technique is different from engraving, in which the incisions are made by removing metal to form depressions in the plate surface which hold ink, although the two methods can easily be combined, as Rembrandt often did. Because the recurring pressure of printing soon destroys the burr, drypoint is useful only for comparatively small editions; as few as ten or twenty impressions with burr can be made, and after the burr has gone, the comparatively shallow lines will wear out relatively quickly. Most impressions of Rembrandt prints on which drypoint was used show no burr, and often the drypoint lines are very weak, leaving the etched portions still strong. To counter this and allow for longer print runs, electroplating (called steelfacing by printmakers) can harden the surface of a plate and allow the same edition size as produced by etchings and engravings.

History
The technique appears to have been invented by the Housebook Master, a south German 15th-century artist, all of whose prints are in drypoint only. Among the most famous artists of the old master print, Albrecht Dürer produced 3 drypoints before abandoning the technique; Rembrandt used it frequently, but usually in conjunction with etching and engraving. As intaglio techniques, they can all be used on the same plate. Alex Katz used this process to create several of his famous works, such as "Sunny" and "The Swimmer".

In the 20th century many artists produced drypoints, including Max Beckmann, Milton Avery, Hermann-Paul and Martin Lewis. By adding aquatint work on the plate and inking with various colours, artists such as Mary Cassatt have produced colour drypoints. Canadian artist David Brown Milne is credited as the first to produce coloured drypoints by the use of multiple plates, one for each colour. On the West Coast of the United States the respected printmaker Pedro Joseph de Lemos simplified the methods for producing drypoints in art schools.

Contemporary artists who have extensively used drypoint include Louise Bourgeois, Vija Celmins, William Kentridge and Richard Spare.

Types of needles
Any sharp object can theoretically be used to make a drypoint, as long as it can be used to carve lines into metal. Dentistry tools, nails, and metal files can all be used to produce drypoints. However, certain types of needles are created specifically for drypoints:
 * Diamond-tipped needles carve easily through any metal and never need sharpening, but they are expensive.
 * Carbide-tipped steel needles can also be used to great effect, and are cheaper than diamond-tipped needles, but they need frequent sharpening to maintain a sharp point. Steel needles were traditionally used.

Printing processes
Printing is essentially the same as for the other intaglio techniques, but extra care is taken to preserve the burr. After the image is finished, or at least ready to proof, the artist applies ink to the plate with a dauber. Too much pressure will flatten the burrs and ruin the image. Once the plate is completely covered with a thin layer, a small scraper or card is gently used to remove excess ink. Then, a tarlatan cloth tightly wrapped in a spherical shape will be used to wipe away excess ink, by slowly yet firmly rubbing the smooth side of the sphere on the plate in small circular motions. Paper (typically pages from old phone books) may be used for a final wipe of the lightest areas of the image. Some printmakers will use their bare hand instead to wipe these areas. Once the desired amount of ink is removed, the plate is run through an etching press along with a piece of dampened paper to produce a print.

A dampened paper may be produced by soaking a piece of printing paper, or any other papers that are slightly water-absorbent but are not water soluble, into a tray of water for about 5 minutes. Afterwards, the paper is laid onto a towel and dabbed dry. The moist paper allows ink to be drawn out from the burred lines of the plate when it is pressed into it.

Hand-wiping techniques
Drypoint wiping techniques vary slightly from other intaglio techniques. Less pressure is applied to achieve desirable lines, because the burrs forming the image are more fragile than etched or engraved lines, but also because the ink rests on the plate surface, instead of pressed down into indentations. Also, because of the characteristics of the way the burrs catch ink, the direction of the wiping matters. Ink tends to pile up in the lee of the burr during the application of the ink and wiping with the tarlatan, so if the printer wipes in the direction of the lines with their hand, they may remove most of the ink, leaving a light gray line. However, if they wipe perpendicularly to the line, they can actually increase the pile of ink on the other side of the line, darkening the printed line.

title: Drypoint


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Prescott Bush

Prescott Sheldon Bush Sr. (May 15, 1895 – October 8, 1972) was an American banker and Republican Party politician. After working as a Wall Street executive investment banker, he represented Connecticut in the United States Senate from 1952 to 1963. A member of the Bush family, he was the father of President George H. W. Bush, and the paternal grandfather of President George W. Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, Bush graduated from Yale College and served as an artillery officer during World War I. After the war, he worked for several companies, becoming a minor partner of the A. Harriman & Co. investment bank in 1931. He served in several high-ranking United States Golf Association offices, including president of that organization. Bush settled in Connecticut in 1925.

Bush won election to the Senate in a 1952 special election, narrowly defeating Democratic nominee Abraham Ribicoff. In the Senate, Bush staunchly supported President Dwight D. Eisenhower and helped enact legislation to create the Interstate Highway System. Bush won re-election in 1956 but declined to seek re-election in 1962, retiring from the Senate the following year.

Early life
Prescott Bush was born in Columbus, Ohio on May 15, 1895 to Samuel Prescott Bush and Flora Sheldon Bush. Samuel Bush was a railroad middle manager, then a steel company president and, during World War I, a federal government official in charge of coordination of and assistance to major weapons contractors.

Bush attended St. George's School in Middletown, Rhode Island, from 1908–1913. In 1913, he enrolled at Yale College, where his paternal grandfather, Rev. James Smith Bush (class of 1844), and his maternal uncle Robert E. Sheldon Jr. (class of 1904) had matriculated. Three subsequent generations of the Bush family have been Yale alumni.

Prescott Bush was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity and Skull and Bones secret society. George H. W. Bush was also a member of the society, as is his son, George W. Bush. George H. W. Bush and George Bush were, however, not members of Zeta Psi, and were members, instead, of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. According to Skull and Bones lore, Prescott Bush was among a group of Bonesmen who dug up and removed the skull of Geronimo from his grave at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1918. According to historian David L. Miller, the Bonesmen probably dug up somebody at Fort Sill, but not Geronimo.

Prescott Bush was a cheerleader, played varsity golf and baseball, sang in the Whiffenpoofs, and was president of the Yale Glee Club.

After graduation, Bush served as a field artillery captain with the American Expeditionary Forces (1917–1919) during World War I. He received intelligence training at Verdun, France and was briefly assigned to a staff of French officers. Alternating between intelligence and artillery, he came under fire in the Meuse–Argonne offensive.

Business career
After his discharge in 1919, Prescott Bush went to work for the Simmons Hardware Company in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Bush family moved to Columbus, Ohio, in 1923, where Prescott briefly worked for the Hupp Products Company. In November 1923, he became president of sales for Stedman Products in South Braintree, Massachusetts. During this time, he lived in a Victorian house at 173 Adams Street in Milton, Massachusetts, where his son, George H. W. Bush, was born.

In 1924, Bush became vice-president of the investment bank A. Harriman & Co. where his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker was president. Bush's Yale classmates and fellow Bonesmen E. Roland Harriman and Knight Woolley also worked with the company.

In 1925, he joined the United States Rubber Company of New York City as manager of the foreign division, and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut.

In 1931, he became a partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., which was created through the 1931 amalgamation of A. Harriman & Co with Brown Bros. & Co., (a merchant bank founded in Philadelphia in 1818) and with Harriman Brothers & Co. (established in New York City in 1927).

He was an avid golfer, and in 1935 was named head of the USGA.

From 1944–1956, Prescott Bush was a member of the Yale Corporation, the principal governing body of Yale University. He was on the board of directors of CBS, having been introduced to chairman William S. Paley around 1932 by his close friend and colleague W. Averell Harriman, who became a major Democratic Party power broker.

Business Plot and Union Banking Corporation
In July 2007, Harper's Magazine published an article by Scott Horton, an American attorney known for his work in human rights law and the law of armed conflict, claiming that Prescott Bush was involved in the 1934 Business Plot, a failed plan by some of America's wealthy to trick Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler into helping them overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Bush was a founder and one of seven directors (including W. Averell Harriman) of the Union Banking Corporation (holding a single share out of 4,000 as a director), an investment bank that operated as a clearing house for many assets and enterprises held by German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, an early supporter and financier of the Nazi Party. In July 1942, the bank was suspected of holding gold on behalf of Nazi leaders. A subsequent government investigation disproved those allegations but confirmed the Thyssens' control, and in October 1942 the United States seized the bank under the Trading with the Enemy Act and held the assets for the duration of World War II.

Journalist Duncan Campbell pointed out documents showing that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen. Bush was the director of the Union Banking Corporation that "represented Thyssen's US interests", continuing to work for the bank after America's entry into the war.

Political life
Prescott Bush was politically active on social issues. He was involved with the American Birth Control League as early as 1942, and served as the treasurer of the first nationwide campaign of Planned Parenthood in 1947. He was also an early supporter of the United Negro College Fund, serving as chairman of the Connecticut branch in 1951.

From 1947–1950, he served as Connecticut Republican finance chairman, and was the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1950. A columnist in Boston said that Bush "is coming on to be known as President Truman's Harry Hopkins. Nobody knows Mr. Bush and he hasn't a Chinaman's chance." (Harry Hopkins had been one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's closest advisors.) Bush's ties with Planned Parenthood also hurt him in strongly-Catholic Connecticut, and were the basis of a last-minute campaign in churches by Bush's opponents; the family vigorously denied the connection, but Bush lost to Sen. William Burnett Benton by only 1,000 votes.

Prescott Bush sought a rematch with Sen. Benton in 1952, but withdrew as the party turned to William Purtell. The death of Senator Brien McMahon later that year, however, created a vacancy and this time the Republicans nominated Bush. He defeated the Democratic nominee, Abraham Ribicoff, and was elected to the Senate. A staunch supporter of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he served until January 1963. He was re-elected in 1956 with 55% of the vote over Democrat Thomas J. Dodd (later U.S. Senator from Connecticut and father of Christopher J. Dodd), and decided not to run for another term in 1962. He was a key ally for the passage of Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System, and during his tenure supported the Polaris submarine project (built by Electric Boat Corporation in Groton, Connecticut), the establishment of the Peace Corps, and voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

On December 2, 1954, Prescott Bush was part of the large (67–22) majority to censure Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy after McCarthy had taken on the U.S. Army and the Eisenhower administration. During the debate leading to the censure, Bush said that McCarthy has "caused dangerous divisions among the American people because of his attitude and the attitude he has encouraged among his followers: that there can be no honest differences of opinion with him. Either you must follow Senator McCarthy blindly, not daring to express any doubts or disagreements about any of his actions, or, in his eyes, you must be a Communist, a Communist sympathizer, or a fool who has been duped by the Communist line." Eisenhower later included Prescott Bush on an undated handwritten list of prospective candidates he favored for the 1960 Republican presidential nomination.

In terms of issues, Bush often agreed with New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. According to Theodore H. White's book about the 1964 presidential election, Bush and Rockefeller were longtime friends. Bush favored a Nixon-Rockefeller ticket for 1960, and was presumed to support Rockefeller's 1964 presidential candidacy until the latter's remarriage in 1963. He then publicly denounced Rockefeller for divorcing his first wife and marrying a woman with whom Rockefeller had been having an affair while married to his first wife. Bush then very publicly endorsed his former Senate colleague Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who was also the older brother of one of Bush's protegés, former Connecticut Governor John Davis Lodge.

Another of Senator Bush's major legislative interests was flood and hurricane protection. He drafted the Bush Hurricane Survey Act (Public Law 71), enabling U.S. Army engineers to develop a new program of community protection against tidal flooding. Bush and Representative John W. McCormack, the Democratic House Majority Leader, co-sponsored the Bush-McCormack Act (Public Law 685), which expedited the construction of local flood protection works.

Personal life
Prescott Bush married Dorothy Wear Walker (1901–1992) on August 6, 1921, in Kennebunkport, Maine. Dorothy Walker Bush was a founding member of the Junior League of Columbus, Ohio in 1923. They had five children: Prescott Jr. (1922–2010), George (1924–2018), Nancy (1926–2021), Jonathan (1931–2021), and William "Bucky" (1938–2018).

Bush founded the Yale Glee Club Associates, an alumni group, in 1937. As was his father-in-law, he was a member of the United States Golf Association, serving successively as secretary, vice-president and president, 1928–1935. He was a multi-year club champion of the Round Hill Club in Greenwich, Connecticut, and was on the committee set up by New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. to help create the New York Mets.

He was a member of the American Legion and the 40 & 8 Society.

Bush maintained homes in New York City, Long Island, Greenwich, the Walker's Point Estate, and Fishers Island, a secluded island off the Connecticut coast.

He died of cancer in 1972 at age 77 at Memorial Hospital in New York City, and is interred at Putnam Cemetery in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Writings
Bush's articles include:
 * "Timely Monetary Policy", Banking, June 1955 and July 1955
 * "To Preserve Peace Let's Show the Russians How Strong We Are!" Reader's Digest, July 1959
 * "Politics Is Your Business", Chamber of Commerce, State of New York, Bulletin, May 1960

title: Prescott Bush


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Aquatint

Aquatint is an intaglio printmaking technique, a variant of etching that produces areas of tone rather than lines. For this reason it has mostly been used in conjunction with etching, to give both lines and shaded tone. It has also been used historically to print in colour, both by printing with multiple plates in different colours, and by making monochrome prints that were then hand-coloured with watercolour.

It has been in regular use since the later 18th century, and was most widely used between about 1770 and 1830, when it was used both for artistic prints and decorative ones. After about 1830 it lost ground to lithography and other techniques. There have been periodic revivals among artists since then. An aquatint plate wears out relatively quickly, and is less easily reworked than other intaglio plates. Many of Goya's plates were reprinted too often posthumously, giving very poor impressions.

Among the most famous prints using the aquatint technique are the major series by Goya, many of The Birds of America by John James Audubon (with the colour added by hand), and prints by Mary Cassatt printed in colour using several plates.

Technique
In intaglio printmaking techniques such as engraving and etching, the artist makes marks into the surface of the plate (in the case of aquatint, a copper or zinc plate) that are capable of holding ink. The plate is inked all over then wiped clean to leave ink only in the marks. The plate is passed through a printing press together with a sheet of paper, and strong pressure applied pushing the paper into the marks, so that a transfer of the ink to the paper occurs. This is repeated many times. Like etching, aquatint uses the application of a mordant (acid) to etch into the metal plate. Where etching uses a needle to scratch through an acid-proof resist and make lines, aquatint uses powdered rosin (resin) to create a tonal effect. The rosin is acid resistant and typically adhered to the plate by controlled heating; where the grains are will print white, with black areas around. The tonal variation is controlled by the level of mordant exposure over large areas, and thus the image is shaped by large sections at a time. The rosin is then washed off the plate before printing.

Another tonal technique, mezzotint, begins with a plate surface that is evenly indented and roughened so that it will print as an even and fairly dark tone of ink. The mezzotint plate is then smoothed and polished to make areas carry less ink and thus print a lighter shade. Alternatively, beginning with a smooth plate, areas are roughened to make them darker. Occasionally the two techniques of aquatint and mezzotint are combined.

Early history
A variety of early experiments aimed to add tonal effects to etching included the first use of a resin dust ground by the painter and printmaker Jan van de Velde IV in Amsterdam, around 1650. However, none of these developed a technique that caught on with other printmakers. Experimentation by several artists with somewhat different techniques reached a peak after about 1750, and as they were initially very secretive, the history of the emergence of the standard technique remains unclear.

Various claimants include the Swede Per Floding working with the Frenchman François-Philippe Charpentier in 1761, J. B. Delafosse in 1766, working with the amateur Jean-Claude Richard (often rather misleadingly known as the Abbé de Saint-Non) in 1766, and Jean-Baptiste Le Prince in 1768–69. Le Prince was more effective than the others in publicizing his technique, publishing Découverte du procédé de graver au lavis in 1780, though he failed to sell his secret in his lifetime. It was bought posthumously by the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1782, who released it on an open basis. Though England was to become one of the countries using the technique most, the earliest English aquatints were not exhibited until 1772, by the cartographer Peter Perez Burdett. It was taken up by the watercolourist Paul Sandby, who also seems to have introduced technical refinements as well as inventing the name "aquatint". In England artists such as Sandby and Thomas Gainsborough were attracted by the suitability of etched outlines with aquatint for reproducing the popular English landscape watercolours, which at this period usually also had been given an initial outline drawing in ink. Publishers of prints and illustrations for expensive books, both important British markets at the time, also adopted the technique. In all these areas, a print with etching and aquatint gave very satisfactory results when watercolour was added by relatively low-skilled painters copying a model, with a flat wash of colour on top of the varied tones of the aquatint. After the French Revolution, one of the most successful publishers in London, the German Rudolf Ackermann, had numbers of French refugees working on the floor above his shop in The Strand in London, each brushing a single colour and then passing the sheet down a long table.

Over the same period in France there was sustained interest in techniques for true colour printing using multiple plates, which used multiple printmaking techniques which often included aquatint (or mezzotint) for tone. Artists included Jean-François Janinet and Philibert-Louis Debucourt, whose La Promenade Publique is often thought the masterpiece of the style. Another branch of this French movement mostly used mezzotint for tone and came to specialize in illustrating medical textbooks. This was at first led by Jacob Christoph Le Blon (1667–1741), who very nearly anticipated modern CMYK colour separation and then carried on by his pupil Jacques Fabien Gautier d'Agoty and later members of the d'Agoty family until around 1800.

Goya, maker of incontestably the greatest prints using aquatint, probably learned of the technique through Giovanni David from Genoa, the first significant Italian to use it. Goya used it, normally with etching and often burnishing and other techniques, in his great print series Los Caprichos (1799), Los Desastres de la Guerra (1810–1819), La Tauromaquia (1816) and Los disparates (c. 1816–1823).

Revival
After a period of several decades in the central 19th century when the technique was little used, and definitively superseded for commercial uses, it was revived near the end of the century in France, by Édouard Manet, Félicien Rops, Degas, Pissarro, Jacques Villon and other artists. In 1891, Mary Cassatt, based in Paris, exhibited a series of highly original coloured drypoint and aquatint prints, including Woman Bathing and The Coiffure, inspired by an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints shown there the year before. These used multiple blocks for the different colours. Cassatt was attracted to the simplicity and clarity of Japanese design, and the skillful use of blocks of colour. In her interpretation, she used primarily light, delicate pastel colours and avoided black (a "forbidden" colour among the Impressionists).

It continued to be used in the 20th century, with the Czech T. F. Šimon and the German Johnny Friedlaender notably frequent users. In the United States the printmaker Pedro Joseph de Lemos popularized aquatints in art schools with his publications (1919–1940), which simplified the cumbersome techniques, and with traveling exhibitions of his award-winning prints.

Modern process
An aquatint requires a metal plate, an acid, and something to resist the acid. Traditionally copper or zinc plates were used. The artist applies a ground that will resist acid. Ground is applied by dissolving powdered resin in spirits, by applying the powder directly to the surface of the plate, or by using a liquid acrylic resist. In all forms of etching the acid resist is commonly referred to as "the ground."

An aquatint box is used to apply resin powder. The powder is at the bottom of the box, a crank or a bellows is used to blow the powder up into the air of the box. A window allows the engraver to see the density of flowing powder and to place the plate in the box using a drawer. When the powder covers the plate, it can be extracted from the box for the next operations.

The plate is then heated; if the plate is covered with powder, the resin melts forming a fine and even coat; if it is in spirits, the spirits evaporate and the result is essentially the same. Now the plate is dipped in acid, producing an even and fine level of corrosion (the "bite") sufficient to hold ink. At this point, the plate is said to carry about a 50% halftone. This means that, were the plate printed with no further biting, the paper would display a gray color more or less directly in between white (no ink) and black (full ink).

At some point the artist will then etch an outline of any aspects of the drawing they wish to establish with line; this provides the basis and guide for the later tone work. They may also have applied (at the very start, before any biting occurs) an acid-resistant "stop out" (also called an asphaltum or hard ground) if they intend to keep any areas totally white and free of ink, such as highlights.

The artist then begins immersing the plate in the acid bath, progressively stopping out (protecting from acid) any areas that have achieved the designed tonality. These tones, combined with the limited line elements, give aquatints a distinctive, watery look. Also, aquatints, like mezzotints, provide ease in creating large areas of tone without laborious cross-hatching; but aquatint plates, it is noted, are generally more durable than mezzotint plates.

The first etch should be for a short period (30 seconds to 1 minute, with a wide variation depending on how light the lightest tones are meant to be). A test piece may be made with etching times noted, as the strength of the etchant will vary. More than thirty minutes should produce a very dark area. Etching for many hours (up to 24) will be as dark as etching for one hour, but the deep etch would produce raised ink on the paper.

Contemporary printmakers often use spraypaint instead of a powder, particularly when using the technique known as sugar-lift. To produce a printing surface using sugar-lift, the artist makes a solution of India ink and sugar by melting sugar into heated ink. This mixture is then applied to a prepared plate with a brush, allowing for a bold expression not possible with the most etching techniques. When the ink/sugar mixture is dry the plate is coated with asphaltum (liquid ground); the plate is then submerged in warm water which dissolves the sugar so that the image "lifts off" the plate. The exposed areas are then aquatinted to hold ink and the plate is ready to be printed from.

Famous examples

 * Francisco Goya famously took great advantage of aquatint printmaking, in his Los Caprichos series (1799); Los Desastres de la Guerra (1810–1819); La Tauromaquia (1816); and Los disparates (c. 1816–1823).
 * Master engraver Robert Havell used aquatint for John James Audubon's Birds of America (1826–1838).
 * David Hockney, known for his many paintings of the Los Angeles lifestyle in the 1960s, has created a number of aquatints and etchings used with color in his "The Blue Guitar" series of prints.
 * La Belle Assemblée, a British women's magazine published from 1806 to 1837 had many aquatint colored plates.

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Demographic history of Kosovo

This article includes information on the demographic history of Kosovo.

Prehistory and antiquity
The Dardani (Δαρδάνιοι, Δάρδανοι; Dardani) were a Paleo-Balkan tribe who lived in a region named Dardania after their settlement there. The eastern parts of the region were at the Thraco-Illyrian contact zone. In archaeological research, Illyrian names are predominant in western Dardania (present-day Kosovo), and occasionally appear in eastern Dardania (present-day south-eastern Serbia), while Thracian names are found in the eastern parts, but are absent from the western parts. Thus, their identification as either an Illyrian or Thracian tribe has been a subject of debate; the ethnolinguistic relationship between the two groups being largely uncertain and debated itself as well. The correspondence of Illyrian names, including those of the ruling elite, in Dardania with those of the southern Illyrians suggests a "thracianization" of parts of Dardania.

Roman antiquity
After the Roman conquest of Illyria in 168 BC, Romans colonized and founded several cities in the region, such as Ulpiana, Theranda and Vicianum, later incorporating it into the Roman province of Illyricum in 59 BC. Subsequently, it became part of Moesia Superior in AD 87. The region was exposed to an increasing number of 'barbarian' raids from the 4th century AD onwards, culminating with the Slavic migrations of the 6th and 7th centuries. Archaeologically, the early Middle Ages represent a hiatus in the material record. The decrease in material finds corresponds to the effects which the plague of Justinian probably had throughout the Balkans as millions of people died and many regions became depopulated. The population decrease in the Balkans partially influenced the Slavic migrations of the following centuries.

Early and High Middle Ages
The region had been part of the Roman and the Byzantium until the first major Slav raids took place in the middle of Justinian's reign. In 547 and 548 the Slavs invaded the territory of modern Kosovo, and then got as far as Durrës on the Northern Albanian coast and reached all the way down to Greece.

Although the Balkans had been raided by Slavic tribes, the early Slavic settlement and power in Kosovo did not become large until the region was later absorbed into the Bulgarian Empire in the 850s, when Christianity and a Byzantine-Slavic culture was cemented in the central and eastern Balkans. This era represents the formation of most Slavic toponyms in Kosovo which reflect Old Bulgarian development. The Gorani people in Kosovo represent the last population in Kosovo which still speaks a Bulgarian/Macedonian dialect.

Following the collapse of the Bulgarian Empire, the region again became part of the Byzantine Empire after the empire fully re-established itself. It would stay under Byzantine rule for nearly two centuries until Serbian Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja, who had expanded his empire south and into Kosovo, conquered it by the end of the 12th century.

According to Serbian scholars, although Albanians lived between Lake Skadar and the Devoll river in the 1100s, Albanian migration into the plains of Metohija (Dukagjin) commenced at the end of the century. Some of the arriving Albanians were assimilated by Serbs and Montenegrins.

According to historian Noel Malcolm the Vlach-Romanian and Aromanian languages originated in the region from Romanized Illyrians and Thracians, and was a contact zone between the Albanian and Romanian language.

Vlach-Romanian and Aromanian toponyms are present in the surrounding areas, such as Surdul in Southern Serbia. Katun is a living style associated with Eastern Romance people. Katun means 'village' in the Albanian, Aromanian and Romanian languages.

When King Stefan of Dečani founded the Visoki Dečani Monastery in the 1330s, he referred to "villages and katuns of Vlachs and Albanians" in the area of the white Drin. Dečanski granted the monastery pasture land along with Vlach and Albanian katuns around the Drim and Lim rivers, which carried salt and provided serf labour for the monastery.

Dušan's Code, the legal system established in 1349, included a prohibition of intermarriage between Serbs and Vlachs. The protection of Slav peasants by the Dušan's Code forced many Vlachs to migrate from Serbia.

Several Albanian personal names and place names appear in various parts of Kosovo and North Macedonia in the 13th century, the first identifiably Albanian place name appearing in Kosovo, attested in a 1253 statement by Serbian knez Miroslav. By 1330, the frequency of identifiably Albanian names in a 1330 chrysobull describing estates in Decan is "many", although attempts to ascertain reliable percentages of the Albanian population relative to Serbs at this period or later are described by Madgearu as "difficult".

The presence of Vlach villages in the vicinity of Prizren is attested in 1198–1199 by a charter of Stephan Nemanja. An old Albanian population lived in the region before the Ottoman period.

Bulgarian rule
Between ca. 830 and ca. 1015 the region was Bulgarian. According to historian Richard J. Crampton, the development of Old Church Slavonic literacy during the 10th century had the effect of preventing the assimilation of the South Slavs into the Byzantine culture, which promoted the formation of a distinct Bulgarian identity in that area. Afterwards it was ceded to the Byzantine empire as a province called Byzantine Bulgaria.

Byzantine rule
In 1072 an unsuccessful rebellion led by local Bulgarian landlord Georgi Voiteh arose in the area and in 1072 in Prizren he was crowned "Tsar of Bulgaria". At the end of the 11th century, the Byzantine domains in the Balkans became an arena of fierce hostilities. At the end of the 12th century, formally Byzantium was still the sovereign. The disintegration of Byzantium was complete when in 1204 the Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople.

Late Middle Ages
Chrysobulls related to tax rights for Orthodox monasteries form the vast majority of the existing sources for the available demographics of Kosovo in the 14th century. The Dečani chrysobulls (1321–31) of Serbian king Stefan of Dečani contains a detailed list of landholdings and tax farming rights which the Serbian Orthodox monastery of Visoki Dečani held over settlements and various communities in an area which spanned from southern Serbia (modern Sandzak), Kosovo, Montenegro and parts of northern Albania. The chrysobulls were signed by King Stefan of Dečani who confirmed existing rights and gave new ones to the monastery. The chrysobulls listed that Visoki Dečani held tax farming rights over 2,097 households of meropsi (dependent farmers-serfs), 266 Vlach households (pastoral communities) and 69 sokalniki (craftsmen). Among the settlements over which Dečani held tax rights in modern-day Kosovo, find Serbs living alongside Albanians and Vlachs. In the golden bull of Stefan Dušan (1348) a total of nine Albanian villages are cited within the vicinity of Prizren among the communities which were under tax obligations. During this period, among a part of the Albanians a degree of Serbianization and conversions to Serbian Orthodoxy seems to have taken place.

The Ottoman cadastral tax census (defter) of 1455 in the District of Branković (defter Vuk-ili) is one of the oldest Ottoman tax registers in the Balkans. The District of Branković at the time of the defter included parts of central Serbia (present-day Toplica District and the historical Raška Region), part of northeastern Montenegro and parts of eastern Kosovo (the Kosovo Plain). The vast majority of names recorded in Vuk-ili by the Ottomans in 1455 are Slavic.

The defters of 1485–87 of the Sanjak of Shkodra and parts of the former Branković areas recorded:
 * Vushtrri district:
 * 16,729 Christian households (412 in Pristina and Vushtrri)
 * 117 Muslim households (94 in Pristina and 83 in rural areas)
 * District of Peć:
 * Peć (town)
 * 121 Christian households
 * 33 Muslim households
 * Suho Grlo and Metohija:
 * 131 Christian households
 * Donja Klina – nationalities not clear according to Ottoman records based on religion
 * Dečan – nationalities not clear according to Ottoman records based on religion
 * Rural areas:
 * 6,124 Christian households (99%)
 * 55 Muslim households (1%)

Scholarship on Kosovo has encompassed Ottoman provincial surveys that have revealed the 15th-century ethnic composition of some Kosovo settlements. However, both Serbian and Albanian historians using these records have made much of them while proving little. Madgearu (2008) argues that the series of defters from 1455 onward "shows that Kosovo... was a mosaic of Serbian and Albanian villages", while Prishtina and Prizren already had significant Albanian Muslim populations, and that the same defter of 1455 indicates the presence of Albanians in Tetovo. During the 15th century, Albanians moved to the town of Novo Brdo to work on the mines.

1520–1535

 * Vushtrri: 19,614 households
 * Christians
 * 700 Muslim households (3.5%)
 * Prizren
 * Christians
 * 359 Muslim households (2%)

1591
Ottoman defter from 1591:
 * Prizren – Christian majority, significant Muslim minority
 * Gora – No nationalities are recorded. only religious affiliations of dwellers.
 * Opolje – Christian majority, significant Muslim minority

17th–18th centuries
In 17th century reports indicate western Kosovo and parts of central Kosovo was Albanian speaking while the Eastern region was Slavic speaking. A wave of Catholic Albanian colonists arrived in the 17th century to the towns of Pristina and Gjakova.

In the 17th century the towns of Peja, Prizren, Prishtina were majority Muslim.

Catholic bishop Pjetër Mazreku noted in 1624 that the Catholics of Prizren were 200, the Serbs (Orthodox) 600, and Muslims, almost all of whom were Albanians, numbered 12,000.

During the Great Austro-Turkish War, Albanian Catholic leaders Pjetër Bogdani and Toma Raspasani rallied Kosovo Albanian Catholics and Muslims to the pro-Austrian cause. Reports of 20,000 Albanians in Kosovo that had turned their weapons against the Turks. After the Austrians were forced to retreat, reprisals on the population followed as a result. In the 1690s Raspasani wrote that most of the Catholics in Kosovo had fled to Budapest where most of them died of hunger or disease.

Significant clusters of Albanian populations lived in Kosovo especially in the west and centre before and after the Habsburg invasion of 1689–1690. Due to the Ottoman-Habsburg wars and their aftermath, some Albanians from contemporary northern Albania and Western Kosovo settled within the wider Kosovo area in the second half of the 18th century, at times instigated by Ottoman authorities. There were also movements and forcible movements of Orthodox Serbs into Kosovo instigated by Ottoman authorities and as such, historians have concluded these events affected all categories of the populations rather than one eroding the other.

Significant Albanian clusters also existed in Eastern Kosovo. Some of the towns had a large Muslim Albanian population that did not regain their pre-1690 levels until the mid 19th century.

Early reports state that hundreds of villages between the area of Trepca, Vushtrri and Prishtina region of eastern Kosovo were abandoned, while villages in the western part of Kosovo were still inhabited.

Successive persecutions of Serbs by the Ottomans in the southern Balkans resulted in migrations to areas under the control of the Habsburg monarchy, in particular during the Great Turkish War of 1683–1699. During that war between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, it led to the flight of a substantial numbers of Serbs and Albanians who had sided with the Austrians, from within and outside Kosovo, to Austrian held Vojvodina and the Military Frontier – Patriarch Arsenije III, one of the refugees, referred to 30,000 or 40,000 souls, but a much later monastic source referred to 37,000 families. Serbian historians have used this second source to talk of a Great Migration of Serbs. Wars in 1717–1738 led to a second exodus of refugees (both Serbian and Albanian) from inside and outside Kosovo, together with reprisals and the enslavement and deportation of a number of Serbs and Albanians by the victorious Ottomans.

19th century

Kosovo was part of the Kosovo Vilayet, which included Kosovo, parts of northern and northwestern North Macedonia, parts of modern eastern Montenegro and much of the Sandzak region. Nineteenth-century data about the Kosovo Vilayet tend to be rather conflicting, giving sometimes numerical superiority to the Serbs and sometimes to the Albanians. The Ottoman statistics are regarded as unreliable, as the empire counted its citizens by religion rather than nationality, using birth records rather than surveys of individuals.

A map published by French ethnographer G. Lejean in 1861 shows that Albanians lived on around 57% of Kosovo Vilayet while a similar map, published by British travellers G. M. Mackenzie and A. P. Irby in 1867 shows slightly less; these maps don't show which population was larger overall. Nevethless, maps cannot be used to measure population as they leave out density.

Maps published by German historian Kiepert in 1876, J. Hahn and Austrian consul K. Sax, show that Albanians live on most of the territory of what is now Kosovo, however, they do not show which population is larger. According to these, the regions of Kosovska Mitrovica and Kosovo Polje were settled mostly by Serbs, whereas most of the territory of western and eastern parts of today's province was settled by Muslim Albanians.

An Austrian statistics published in 1899 estimated about the population of the Kosovo Vilayet: of which national affiliation is not mentioned according to the source
 * 349,350

During and after the Serbian–Ottoman War of 1876–78, between 49,000 and 130,000 Albanians were expelled by the Serb army from the Sanjak of Niș (located north-east of contemporary Kosovo) and fled to the Kosovo Vilayet. Serbs from the Lab region moved to Serbia during and after the war of 1876 and incoming Albanian refugees (muhaxhirë) repopulated their villages. Apart from the Lab region, sizeable numbers of Albanian refugees were resettled in other parts of northern Kosovo alongside the new Ottoman-Serbian border. Most Albanian refugees were resettled in over 30 large rural settlements in central and southeastern Kosovo. Many refugees were also spread out and resettled in urban centers that increased their populations substantially. Western diplomats reporting in 1878 placed the number of refugee families at 60,000 families in Macedonia, with 60–70,000 refugees from Serbia spread out within the vilayet of Kosovo. The Ottoman governor of the Vilayet of Kosovo estimated in 1881 the refugees number to be around 65,000 with some resettled in the Sanjaks of Üsküp and Yeni Pazar.

In the late Ottoman period, Kosovo vilayet contained a diverse population of Muslim Albanians and Orthodox Serbs that was split along religious and ethnic lines.

Muslim Albanians formed the majority of the population in Kosovo vilayet that included an important part of the urban-professional and landowning classes of major towns., while Serbs were a majority in Eastern Kosovo, with a sizable Bulgarian minority in the south as well. Western Kosovo was composed of 50,000 inhabitants and an area dominated by the Albanian tribal system with 600 Albanians dying per year from blood feuding. The Yakova (Gjakovë) highlands contained 8 tribes that were mainly Muslim and in the Luma area near Prizren there were 5 tribes, mostly Muslim. The population of the tribal areas were composed of Kosovar Malisors (highlanders). The town of İpek had crypto-Christians who were of the Catholic faith.

Muslim Bosniaks whose native language was Slavic formed a sizable number of Kosovo vilayet's population and were concentrated mainly in Yenipazar sanjak. Circassian refugees who came from Russia were resettled by Ottoman authorities within Kosovo vilayet in 1864, numbering some 6,000 people by the 1890s.

In the northern half of Kosovo vilayet Orthodox Serbs were the largest Christian group and formed a majority within the eastern areas. Several thousand Aromanians inhabited Kosovo vilayet. Bulgarians lived in the southern half of Kosovo vilayet.

Ottoman provincial records for 1887 estimated that Albanians formed more than half of Kosovo vilayet's population concentrated in the sanjaks of İpek, Prizren and Priştine. In the sanjaks of Yenipazar, Taşlica and Üsküp, Albanians formed a smaller proportion of the population.

In 1897, the Ottoman authorities ordered a religious census for Kosovo, which found that there were 633,765 Muslims and 333,406 Christians in Kosovo at the time, meaning that Christians formed 35% of the population. Christians were severely underrepresented in the local governments and administration, with only a few officials being Christians in the entirety of Kosovo. Paolo Maggiolini attributes the decline of the Christian population to failure of the 1878 uprising, which was used by the Ottoman authorities to justify forced conversions and expulsions of the Catholic and Orthodox communities in Kosovo.

According to Ger Duijzings, the middle of the 19th century marked the first time when Albanian speakers formed a majority in Kosovo, with 1870s marking the point at which relations between the Serbs and Albanians of Kosovo turned highly hostile and violent. He argues that less than half of Kosovo was ethnically homogenous at the time - constant settlement and migration greatly undermined the local and tribal identities of Kosovo, with most Albanians being poorly integrated and Serbs either living in segregated Christian enclaves or assimilating into the Albanian majority:

"In Kosovo, the process of Albanianization, i.e. the continuous migration of Albanians from the tribal areas of northern Albania into Kosovo, coincided with the process of Islamicization. The great majority of Albanians converted to Islam in the course of this process. Also many Serbs converted, subsequently adopting Albanian, the dominant language of their environment. These processes of Islamicization and Albanianization were still in full swing in the nineteenth century."

Because the process of religious conversion was violent and forced, Kosovo Albanians were also only nominally Muslims, with converts becoming fully only Islamicized after several generations. Duijzings also questions the concept of "Great Exodus of Serbs" of Kosovo propagated by Serbian historians, arguing that the main reason for sharp decline of Christianity in Kosovo was the dismantlement of ecclesiastical structures undertaken by the Ottoman administration in 18th and 19th century, resulting in "a process of Islamicization and Albanianization of Serbs."

Note: Territory of Ottoman Kosovo Vilayet was quite different from modern-day Kosovo.

Early 20th century

According to Aram Andonyan and Zavren Biberyan, in 1908, the Kosovo Vilayet, which included modern Kosovo and the northwestern part of modern North Macedonia, had a total population of 908,115, of which the largest group were Albanians with 46,1%, followed by Bulgarians at 29.1%, Serbs at 12.4% and Turks at 9.8%.

German scholar Gustav Weigand gave the following statistical data about the population of Kosovo, based on the pre-war situation in Kosovo in 1912:
 * Pristina District: 67% Albanians, 27% Serbs
 * Prizren District: 63% Albanians, 36% Serbs
 * Vushtrri District: 90% Albanians, 10% Serbs
 * Ferizaj District: 70% Albanians, 30% Serbs
 * Gnjilane District: 75% Albanians, 23% Serbs
 * Mitrovica District: 60% Serbs, 40% Albanians
 * Kaçanik District: almost exclusively Albanian
 * Gjakova & Metohija District: almost exclusively Albanian.

Ottoman population records
The Ottoman population records for 1895 indicate male population of 132,450 Muslims and 73,924 Christians for the Sanjak of Pristina, 73,708 Muslims and 24,101 Christians for the Sanjak of Prizren and 24,852 Muslims and 9,468 Christians for the Sanjak of Ipek, or a total of some 462,000 Muslims (of both sexes), or 68.2%, and some 215,000 Christians (of both sexes), or 31.8%, for the three sanjaks that form the majority of Kosovo. However, the data includes the large Kalkandelen kaza in the region of Macedonia, while the "Christians" category also includes Roman Catholics.

According to the 1905–1906 census of the Ottoman Empire, the population of the Sanjak of Pristina consisted of 278,870 Muslims and 111,328 Serbian Patriarchists, of the Sanjak of Prizren of 221,882 Muslims, 25,482 Serbian Patriarchists and 19,320 Bulgarian Exarchists (data includes the large Kalkandelen kaza in the region of Macedonia) and of the Sanjak of Ipek of 121,264 Muslims and 30,210 Serbian Patriarchists.

Data for the Kalandelen kaza is only available for the 1881-1882 census of the Ottoman Empire. It lists male population of 29,212 Muslims (or some 58,000 Muslims of both sexes), 4,990 Patriarchists (or some 10,000 of both sexes) and 9,830 Bulgarian Exarchists (or some 20,000 of both sexes). Thus, the population of the three sanjaks, minus the Kalkandelen kaza, for 1905/1906 consisted of 564,016 Muslims (78.2%) and 157,020 Serbian Patriarchists (21.8%). No data is provided about the third major confessional group in Kosovo, Roman Catholics.

Balkan Wars and First World War (Montenegro and Serbia)
Kosovo was part of the Ottoman Empire and following the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), the western part was included in Montenegro and the rest within Serbia. Citing Serbian sources, Noel Malcolm also states that in 1912 when Kosovo came under Serbian control, "the Orthodox Serb population [was] at less than 25%" of Kosovo's entire population.

Beginning from 1912, Montenegro initiated its attempts at colonisation and enacted a law on the process during 1914 that aimed at expropriating 55,000 hectares of Albanian land and transferring it to 5,000 Montenegrin settlers. Some Serb colonisation of Kosovo took place during the Balkan Wars. Serbia undertook measures for colonisation by enacting a decree aimed at colonists within "newly liberated areas" that offered 9 hectares of land to families.

Yugoslav Interwar period
In the aftermath of the First World War, Serbian control over Kosovo was restored and the Kingdom pursued a policy to alter the national and religious demographics of Kosovo and to Serbianise the area through colonisation. Kosovo was an area where Serbs were not a majority population and the state sought demographic change in those areas through land reform and a colonisation policy. A new decree issued in 1919 and later in 1920 restarted the colonisation process in places where Albanians lived in Kosovo and Vardar Macedonia.

1921 census

 * The 1921 Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes population census for the territories comprising modern-day Kosovo listed 439,010 inhabitants:
 * By religion:

 * Muslims: 329,502 (75.1%)
 * Eastern Orthodox Serbs: 93,203 (21.2%)
 * Roman Catholics: 15,785 (3.6%)
 * Jews: 427
 * Greek Catholics: 26

 * By native language:

 * Albanian: 288,907 (65.8%)
 * Serbian or Croatian: 114,095 (26.0%)
 * Turkish: 27,915 (6.4%)
 * Romanian–Cincarian (Aromanian): 402
 * Slovene: 184
 * German: 30
 * Hungarian: 12

In the Yugoslav census of 1921, Albanians formed the majority population of Kosovo at around 64 percent with some 72 percent belonging to the Muslim faith. Government sponsored colonisation of Kosovo and Vardar Macedonia was initiated in 1920 when on 24 September the Assembly of the Yugoslav Kingdom passed the Decree on the Colonisation of the Southern Provinces of Yugoslavia. The decrees were intended as a reward to former soldiers and chetniks for their service during the Balkan Wars and World War One with incentives offered to settle in Kosovo that allowed them to claim between 5 and 10 hectares of land. The military veterans that settled in Kosovo were known as dobrovoljac (volunteers) and were a politically reliable group for the state. The colonisation process also entailed the arrival of Serbian bureaucrats to Kosovo along with their families. During 1919–1928 some 13,000 to 15,914 Serbian families came to live in Kosovo as stipulated to the conditions of the decrees. Between 1918 and 1923, as a result of state policies 30,000 and 40,000 mainly Muslim Albanians migrated to the Turkish regions of İzmir and Anatolia. According to Antonio Baldacci, the Yugoslav census of 1921 significantly underestimated the number of Albanians living in Kosovo.

1931 census

 * According to the 1931 Kingdom of Yugoslavia population census, there were 552,064 inhabitants in today's Kosovo.
 * By religion:

 * Muslims: 379,981 (68.83%)
 * Orthodox Serbs: 150,745 (27.31%)
 * Roman Catholics: 20,568 (3.73%)
 * Evangelists: 114 (0.02%)
 * other: 656 (0.12%)

By the 1930s, the efforts and attempts at increasing the Serb population had failed as the Yugoslav census (1931) showed Albanians were 62 percent of the Kosovan population. Colonisation had managed to partially change the demographic situation in Kosovo and the share of Albanians had decreased from 65 percent (289,000) in 1921 to 61 percent (337,272) in 1931 and Serbs increased from 28 percent (114,000) to 32 percent (178,848). State authorities attempted to decrease the Albanian population through "forced migration", a process that grew during the decade. The second phase of Yugoslav colonisation began in 1931, when the Decree on the Colonisation of the Southern Regions was issued on 11 July. This phase of colonisation was considered unsuccessful because only 60 to 80 thousand people (some 17–20 thousand families) showed a willingness to become settlers and gained land, of whom many failed to follow through.

Based in Ankara, the data gathered for 1919–1940 by the Yugoslav Legation shows 215,412 Albanians migrated to Turkey, whereas data collected by the Yugoslav army shows that until 1939, 4,046 Albanian families went to live in Albania. For 1918 to 1921, Sabrina Ramet cites the estimate that the expulsions of Albanians reduced their numbers from around 800,000 – 1,000,000 within Kosovo down to some 439,500. Between 1923 and 1939, some 115,000 Yugoslav citizens migrated to Turkey and both Yugoslavian and Turkish sources state that Albanians composed most of that population group. Yugoslav sources downplayed the number of Albanians who left the region. Official Yugoslav sources claimed that between 1927 and 1939 some 23,601 Muslims from Kosovo left for Turkey (19,279) and Albania (4,322). The exact number of Albanians who were expelled is difficult to determine but between 200,000 and 300,000 migrants moved from Yugoslavia mostly to Turkey between WWI and WWII. From 1923 to 1939, Albanians comprised about 100,000 in the total population which left Yugoslavia.

Albanian scholars from Albania and Kosovo place the number of Albanian refugees from 300,000 upward into the hundreds of thousands and state that they left Yugoslavia due to duress. Other estimates given by scholars outside the Balkans for Kosovan Albanians that emigrated during 1918–1941 are between 90,000 and 150,000 or 200,000–300,000. To date, access is unavailable to the Turkish Foreign Ministry archive regarding this issue and as such the total numbers of Albanians arriving to Turkey during the interwar period are difficult to determine.

World War II
During World War II, a large area of Kosovo was attached to Italian controlled Albania. Kosovo Albanians sought to redress the past policies of colonisation and Slavization and power relations between Albanians and Serbs were overturned in the new administration. It resulted in local Serbs and other Serbs that had arrived previously as part of the colonisation plan to be targeted by groups of armed Albanians. Campaigns aimed toward Serbs followed and included the destruction of property, killings, murders and deportations. The majority of Montenegrin and Serb settlers consisting of bureaucrats and dobrovoljac fled from Kosovo to Axis occupied Serbia or Montenegro. One estimate places the number of Serbs that were forced to leave at 70,000-100,000. Serbian historiography estimates that some 100,000 Serbs left Kosovo during 1941–1945. Other Serb sources place the number at 250,000. During this period, Vickers estimates the Italian occupation force facilitated the settlement of up to 72,000 Albanians from Albania to Kosovo.

A three-dimensional conflict ensued, involving inter-ethnic, ideological, and international affiliations, with the first being most important. Nonetheless, these conflicts were relatively low-level compared with other areas of Yugoslavia during the war years, with one Serb historian estimating that 3,000 Albanians and 4,000 Serbs and Montenegrins were killed, and two others estimating war dead at 12,000 Albanians and 10,000 Serbs and Montenegrins. An official investigation conducted by the Yugoslav government in 1964 recorded nearly 8,000 war-related fatalities in Kosovo between 1941 and 1945, 5,489 of whom were Serb and Montenegrin and 2,177 of whom were Albanian.

Communist Yugoslavia
Following the Second World War and establishment of communist rule in Yugoslavia, the colonisation programme was discontinued, as President Tito wanted to avoid sectarian and ethnic conflicts. Tito enacted a temporary decree in March 1945 that banned the return of colonists, which included some Chetniks and the rest that left during the war seeking refuge. Two weeks later Tito issued another decree and followed it with a law in August 1945 that permitted a conditional return for a minority of the colonists. In total, cases of return numbered 11,168, with 4,829 cases confirmed, 5,744 cases partially confirmed alongside 595 cases being denied. A small proportion of the previous colonist population came back to Kosovo and repossessed land, with a greater part of their number (4,000 families) later leaving for other areas of Yugoslavia. From 1945 to 1948, the Yugoslav government opened the border to Albania with an estimated 25,000 Albanians crossing over and settling in Kosovo. The majority of these post-war migrants were family members of Albanians settled in Kosovo during the Second World War by the Italian occupation force.

After the Second World War and the Yugoslavia-Albania split, Yugoslav authorities attempted to downplay links between Albanians of Albania and Kosovo and to implement a policy of "Turkification" that encouraged Turkish language education and emigration to Turkey among Albanians. In 1953, an agreement was reached between Tito and Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, the foreign minister of Turkey that promoted the emigration of Albanians to Anatolia. Forced migration to Turkey increased and numbers cited by Klejda Mulaj for 1953–1957 are 195,000 Albanians leaving Yugoslavia and for 1966, some 230,000 people. Historian Noel Malcolm placed the number of Albanians leaving for Turkey at 100,000 between 1953 and 1966. Factors involved in the upsurge of migration were intimidation and pressure toward the Albanian population to leave through a campaign headed by Yugoslav police chief Aleksandar Ranković that officially was stated as aimed at curbing Albanian nationalism. Kosovo under the control of Ranković was viewed by Turkey as the individual that would implement "the Gentleman's Agreement". At the same time, a new phase of colonisation occurred in the region as Montenegrin and Serb families were installed in Kosovo. The situation ended in 1966 with the removal of Ranković from his position.

From 1961 to 1981, the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo almost doubled as a result of high birth rates, illegal migration from communist Albania and rapid urbanisation. Throughout the same period, the population of ethnic Serbs of Kosovo reduced by half, stimulated by an exodus of ethnic Serbs from the region.

1948 census
727,820 total inhabitants
 * 498,242 Albanians (68.46%)
 * 171,911 Serbs (23.62%)
 * 28,050 Montenegrins (3.86%)
 * 11,230 Roma (1.54%)
 * 5,290 Croats (0.73%)
 * 1,315 Turks (0.18%)
 * 526 Macedonians (0.07%)
 * 362 Russians (0.05%)
 * 283 Slovenes (0.04%)
 * 197 Germans (0.03%)
 * 83 Hungarians (0.01%)
 * 77 Bulgarians (0.01%)
 * 39 Italians
 * 31 Rusyns
 * 29 Czechs
 * 18 Romanians
 * 2 Slovaks
 * 9,679 undecided Muslims (1.33%)
 * 456 other and unknown (0.06%)

1953 census
808,141 total inhabitants
 * 524,559 Albanians (64.91%)
 * 189,969 Serbs (23.51%)
 * 34,583 Turks (4.28%)
 * 31,343 Montenegrins (3.88%)
 * 6,201 Croat (0.77%)
 * 972 Macedonians (0.12%)
 * 411 Slovenes (0.05%)
 * 6,241 undecided Yugoslav (0.77%)
 * 401 other Slav (0.05%)
 * 13,561 others (1.68%)

1961 census
963,959 total inhabitants
 * 646,604 Albanians (67.08%)
 * 227,016 Serbs (23.55%)
 * 37,588 Montenegrins (3.9%)
 * 8,026 Ethnic Muslims (0.83%)
 * 7,251 Croat (0.75%)
 * 5,203 Yugoslavs (0.54%)
 * 3,202 Romani (0.33%)
 * 1,142 Macedonians (0.12%)
 * 510 Slovenes (0.05%)
 * 210 Hungarians (0.02%)

1971 census
1,243,693 total inhabitants
 * 916,168 Albanians or 73.7%
 * 228,264 Serbs (18.4%)
 * 31,555 Montenegrins (2.5%)
 * 26,000 Slavic Muslims (2.1%)
 * 14,593 Romani (1.2%)
 * 12,244 Turks (1.0%)
 * 8,000 Croats (0.7%)
 * 920 Yugoslavs (0.1%)

1981 census
1,584,558 total inhabitants

 * 1,226,736 Albanians (77.42%)
 * 209,498 Serbs (13.2%)
 * 27,028 Montenegrins (1.7%)
 * 2,676 Yugoslavs (0.2%)

Registered population
Official Yugoslav statistical results, almost all Albanians and some Roma and ethnic Muslims boycotted the census following a call by Ibrahim Rugova to boycott Serbian institutions.

359,346 total inhabitants

By ethnicity:

 * 194,190 Serbs
 * 57,758 Muslims (minority boycotted)
 * 44,307 Roma (minority boycotted)
 * 20,356 Montenegrins
 * 9,091 Albanians (majority boycotted)
 * 10,446 Turks
 * 8,062 Croats (Janjevci, Letnicani)
 * 3,457 Yugoslavs

Estimated population
Statistical office of Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija estimated total number of Albanians, Muslims and Roma.

1,956,196 total inhabitants

By ethnicity:

 * 1,596,072 Albanians (81.6%)
 * 194,190 Serbs (9.9%)
 * 66,189 Muslims (3.4%)
 * 45,745 Roma (2.34%)
 * 20,365 Montenegrins (1.04%)
 * 10,445 Turks (0.53%)
 * 8,062 Croats (Janjevci, Letnicani) (0.41)
 * 3,457 Yugoslavs (0.18%)
 * 11,656 others (0.6%)

The corrections should not be taken to be fully accurate. The number of Albanians is sometimes regarded as being an underestimate. On the other hand, it is sometimes regarded as an overestimate, being derived from earlier censa which are believed to be overestimates. The Statistical Office of Kosovo states that the quality of the 1991 census is "questionable." .

In September 1993, the Bosniak parliament returned their historical name Bosniaks. Some Kosovar Muslims have started using this term to refer to themselves since.

Milošević government (1990s)
By 1992, the situation in Kosovo deteriorated and politicians from both sides were at an impasse toward solutions for the future of the region. Concerns increased among Serbs and an organisation was created called the Serb Block for Colonizing Kosovo in Pristina that aimed to get state officials based in Belgrade to raise the Serb population within Kosovo. As such, the state made available loans for building apartments and homes along with employment opportunities for Montenegrins and Serbs that chose to relocate to the region. In March 1992, nearly 3,000 people from the Serb minority in Albania had emigrated to Kosovo after accepting the government offer. At the time, the government under President Slobodan Milošević pursued colonisation amidst a situation of financial difficulties and limited resources. Laws were passed by the parliament of Serbia that sought to change the power balance in Kosovo relating to the economy, demography and politics. The parliament of Serbia on 11 January 1995 passed the Decree for Colonisation of Kosovo of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It outlined government benefits for Serbs who desired to go and live in Kosovo with loans to build homes or purchase other dwellings and offered free plots of land. Few Serbs took up the offer due to the worsening situation in Kosovo at the time.

Around 10,000 Serb refugees from Krajina and over 2000 from Bosnia were resettled in Kosovo, due to the Yugoslav Wars. In 1995, the government attempted to alter the ethnic balance of the region through the planned resettlement of 100,000, later reduced to 20,000 Serbian refugees from Krajina in Croatia to Kosovo. Some of the Serb refugees opposed going to Kosovo. In 1996, official government statistics placed the number of refugees in Kosovo at 19,000. Most of the Serb refugees left thereafter and a few remained. In early 1997, the number of resettled Serb refugees in Kosovo was 4,000 and 6,000 in early 1999. As the sociopolitical situation deteriorated, Kosovo Albanians numbering some 300,000 fled during this period for Western Europe. After the outbreak of conflict between the Milošević government and the Kosovo Liberation Army, in early 1997, an estimated 9,000 Serb refugees and 20,000 local Serbs left Kosovo.

Kosovo War (1999)
During the Kosovo war (March–June 1999), Serb forces, apparently, expelled between 800,000 – 1,000,000 Albanians from Kosovo employing tactics such as confiscating personal documents to make it difficult or prevent any future return. Kosovo Albanians later returned following NATO intervention and the end of the war.

In 1999 more than 11,000 deaths were reported to the office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia prosecutor Carla Del Ponte. Around 10,317 civilians in total were killed during the war, of whom 8,676 were Albanians, 1,196 Serbs and 445 Roma and others in addition to 3,218 killed members of armed formations. , some 3,000 people were still missing, of which 2,500 are Albanian, 400 Serbs and 100 Roma.

In the days after the Yugoslav Army withdrew, over 80,000 (almost half of 200,000 estimated to live in Kosovo) Serb and other non-Albanians civilians were expelled from Kosovo. Estimates of the number of Serbs who left when Serbian forces departed from Kosovo vary from 65,000 to 250,000. In addition, less than one hundred of the Serb refugees from Croatia remained in Kosovo.

2011 census
In the 2011 census there were 1,739,825 inhabitants. ECMI "calls for caution when referring to the 2011 census", due to the boycott by Serb-majority municipalities in North Kosovo and the partial boycott by Serb and Roma in southern Kosovo. According to the data, this is the ethnic composition of Kosovo:
 * Albanians: 1,616,869 (92.9%)
 * Serbs*: 25,532 (1.5%)
 * Bosniaks: 27,553 (1.6%)
 * Turks: 18,738 (1.1%)
 * Ashkali: 15,436 (0.9%)
 * Egyptians: 11,524 (0.6%)
 * Gorani: 10,265 (0.6%)
 * Romani: 8,824 (0.5%)
 * Other: 2352 (0.1%)
 * Unspecified: 2752 (0.1%)

As of 2014, there are around 96,000 Kosovo Serbs and about 3/4 of them live in North Kosovo.

title: Demographic history of Kosovo