This is the third of my articles for Printmaking Today in a series where I have explored the potential offered to the expanded practice of printmaking through the use of alternative substrates and pigments such as ceramics, glass and for this edition, metal. The histories of the use of these three materials are strongly intertwined through their relationship with processes involving kilns, furnaces and extreme heat. Within this context there is a necessity that printed colours retain their hues at temperatures that range from 500 to 1300 degrees centigrade, and it is metal-based pigments, such as copper, chromium and oxides of iron, processed further into a range of colours, which are the mainstay for these printing materials. This quality of resilience, induced through heat means that metal pigments provide durable strength and permanence and when used together with metal substrates they offer tremendous strength of form. Metal also has a long history of and important relationship with printmaking technologies, due to this durability and the material’s inherent transmutable qualities, which allow it to be cast as type or incised as with printing plates, to form strong carriers of visual data. I aim to chronologically illustrate through the following works and objects, how the emerging technologies of printmaking have had and continue to have a relationship with metals, from movable type through to 3D printing. This is a story that dispenses with categories such as the fine and applied arts, and weaves from kitsch objects to artworks, from those made using incredible craft skills to the use of technological ingenuity, buildings to jewellery, lowly tin to noble gold.