Ink Saturation
I’m doing a business card on heavy Savoy bright white paper with a red (P179) ink and am having major issues with the ink completely saturating the paper. The artwork includes a large paint splotch across most of the card with the person’s info contained within (raised, white). I cannot get this splotch to even out and fully saturate. Any ideas? The paint is rubber-based and old so I thought it might need to be thinned out a bit but have not had great success with overnight spray and some tint base which lightened it too much. Please help!!! Thanks a lot-
I am going to try to rephrase your note with more conventional jargon. I’m not trying to be snooty, but just to help you use terminology which we are more likely to understand. Is the following paragraph correct?
You are printing on Savoy bright white paper . The ink color is PMS 179. The art includes a large area where the ink prints solid. There is type reversed out of this image, so it is white and raised. You can’t get good consistent ink coverage in the solid. You used old rubber base ink which you thinned with overnight spray and transparent white, but this reduced the color strength so it doesn’t match PMS 179 any more.
I would suggest not thinning the ink. Usually old rubber base ink prints OK. However, there have been times when it has become too thick, in which case you should get new ink.
There is another recent post on dampening the paper, and this would most likely help. If the card is more than one color, it may give you registration problems, however, if there is tight register of the colors.
There could of course be other causes. If you could post a picture so we could see your problem, that would help.
Large ink coverage and type knocking out to paper color is precarious. The amount of ink needing to be laid down with consistent opacity and smoothness could plug up the type. So, your fighting the ink and type to achieve the best possible print. With type that is a larger point size I’ve not had much problem, however, the smaller type has always been an issue. Transparent white will smooth out the ink, however, you may also end up tinting the 179 ink to a lighter color.
Casey
Inky Lips Letterpress