Just when it was going so well

A whole new way for a print to go wrong

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your printmaking plans. I had thought I was going to show you a nearly finished print this week. But now I’m not.

Recently I’ve been telling you about a new method of registration I’ve been trying and how marvellously well it was going. Indeed it is still working beautifully, it’s just a shame about the printing…

I ran into a whole new problem this week. I had printed six layers of my latest reduction print and it was looking like this. (This is a very close-up detail, which will be considerably larger than life-size if you’re reading this on a computer…. or quite a bit smaller if you’re on your phone).

A close-up detail of part of the print.

The sixth layer, printed three days earlier, had been a light green made by mixing white, process yellow and process cyan. Three of the preceding five layers had also included white in their mix. That’s a lot of white and white ink is…..weird. It can dry either slowly on a print or frustratingly fast on the slab, becoming hard to roll out long before you’ve finished. It can be a devil to clean up, clinging tenaciously to the slab and roller. The only good thing about it is that it stays where it is put. (All blues on the other hand are ambient life forms; ask any printmaker and they will agree. Turn your back for a second and blue ink will slide off your work bench, slither up your arm and then drop to the floor, heading towards the door and freedom). This stubborn inertia therefore made it even more of a surprise when the white ink hidden in my previous layers apparently grew legs and emerged from the primordial soup in a bid for evolution.

Because you see the next layer was supposed to be a mid-green, mixed from process yellow and process cyan. I rolled the ink out onto the lino block. All good. I laid a print over the block. All going to plan, and of course perfectly registered (newsletters passim). I rubbed my hand-press over the paper and gave some extra burnishing with a wooden spoon in the areas I knew hadn’t been picking up so well. So far so normal. I peeled the print back to have a look. WHAT THE **?!!**??

Well some of the green ink had transferred to the print, like it was supposed to, in fact probably most of it. But a large quantity of white ink had crawled out from the print and transferred itself TO THE LINO. So the lino block looked like this.

Please imagine ‘Tubular Bells’ playing in the background as you look at this photo.

That isn’t a faint hint of white, that is actual thick white ink you could wipe off with your finger. Where the heck had it come from?

What is more, some of the white ink (or possibly ectoplasm) had then transferred itself BACK onto the print so that the green ink I had just printed now had white splodges OVER it. This is physically impossible. As if that wasn’t bad enough, this spontaneously generated white ink was so sticky it tore the paper - so that is one ruined print.

White ink ON TOP of the green ink I’ve just printed, and a torn patch to the left of the house.

Once I’d ruined a second print (because I’m an idiot and couldn’t believe it would happen twice) I stepped away from the press, telephoned the ink manufacturer and sobbed at them. This sounds like I telephoned some big faceless head office somewhere but in fact I am very lucky that one of the best printmaking suppliers in the country, Hawthorn Printmakers, are just over a mile from me and so the family who run the business are friends and it’s OK for me to have an emotional breakdown in front of them. Father and son looked at the photos I sent over, put their heads together and came back to me with their guess of what had happened. Having assured me that the formulation of their white ink hasn’t changed, and that they have not recently disturbed a plague pit or other burial ground under their workshop, they suggested, as tactfully and sympathetically as possible, that my studio is so cold that somehow the ink had dried on the surface but stayed damp underneath, and printing the subsequent layer disrupted the surface enough to let it out. This does, I grudgingly accepted, sound more sensible than the theory I had meanwhile posited in the York Printmakers WhatsApp group that my studio is haunted and/or cursed.

So it would appear one solution would be to move from North Yorkshire to the south of France. While this option remains annoyingly unavailable I will just have to go with Plan B which is to turn up the radiator and cultivate patience, waiting an inordinately long time between layers. I can manage the former, and my energy supplier will love me for it, but will have trouble with the latter. I don’t do patience. In fact I sometimes fear I am not psychologically suited to printmaking.

I very much hope that the next time I write I will have made some progress. I am trying not to mourn the two torn and ruined prints as in the bad old days I might have lost that many from an edition to poor registration, and at least I no longer have to worry about that.

See you soon, onwards and upwards.

Jane

PS I have skirted round the fact that the cold studio theory does not address why the previous layers resurrected themselves as pure white ink, rather than the various shades of green, blue and sand that had been printed. Maybe I was right the first time and my studio is cursed.