Mastering ink formulation and ink mixing is essential for quality letterpress printing. But like all printing skills, it requires a fair bit of experimentation and patience. Share your methods for inky success here.
From oil to acrylic to rubber to soy, the modern letterpress printer has many ink options. Despite their different bases or carriers, drying times, and pigment quotient, nearly all inks available to letterpress printers today are made for offset lithography, so some special allowances must be made when using these … Continue reading
Inks can be mixed to obtain a wide variety of colors to suit various purposes in printed materials. Mixing Ink Without a Formula If the color isn’t a critical element, the printer can easily obtain a pleasant color by mixing white or black with a few base colors to obtain … Continue reading
Most Pantone mixing formulas call for use of transparent white ink, but many letterpress printers choose to use opaque instead. One reason to use opaque white is that the mixed color—off press—may resemble more closely the printed color, though the mixed ink will not be perfectly opaque once printed. When … Continue reading