How wallpaper is made

A rotary wallpaper press can print up to 12 colors in one pass at roughly 80 yards a minute.

stations: 7
things upstream: 67
raw sources: 22
steps from the ground: 10

The short version

Wallpaper is a paper or fabric backing that gets a base color, then a pattern printed one color at a time from engraved cylinders or screen stencils. Ink dries between colors. A strike-off sample is checked first, and the full run is printed, optionally coated with starch paste, then cut into rolls.

Make the stencil or roller

A designer's sketch is split into one layer per color. For screen printing, each layer is exposed through a photographic negative onto a light-sensitive screen, which hardens everywhere except the pattern.
Check a strike-off

A few repeats of the pattern are printed as a sample and compared to the design. Only after they are approved does the full run begin.

Goes in
Paper Ink
Lay the base color

The paper backing is rolled with a solid background color. On many grades the backing is made from ground wood or wood pulp.

Goes in
Paper Paint
Print color by color

In rotary printing, mesh-covered tubes feed ink through the stencil onto the moving paper. Each tube lays down one color.

up to 12 colors

Goes in
Ink
Dry between colors

Each color needs to set before the next one touches it. The choice of solvent in the ink, water or acetone for instance, changes how long the wait is.
Add paste if prepasted

Prepasted rolls get a wet coating of cornstarch or wheat starch that is dried on, and the installer reactivates it with water.

Goes in
Corn starch
Cut and roll

The long printed web is cut to retail lengths and wound into rolls.

End of the lineWallpaper

Worth repeating

The earliest European wallpapers, from as early as the thirteenth century, were painted images called domino papers.
By about 1885, cylinder printing on wood pulp paper made it cheaper to wallpaper a US house than to paint it.