Thinning Oil Based Ink for Airbrushing (Edging Cards)
I’m just curious, has anyone thinned oil based letterpress ink for airbrushing? I was going to invest a little and get an airbrush to edge my cards to learn the process. It would certainly be nice if the ink you mixed for printing could be thinned and sprayed so that you can get good color matching. I’m sure I could just ‘brayer’ or ‘burnish’ it on, but I’d prefer to airbrush. Of course, I could just color match by eye (airbrush inks don’t come in the same base pantone mixing colors, but instead in the typical painter’s palette colors), but why waste the extra ink (I usually only have a small amount left, not enough for future printing)?
The ink would need to be as thin as milk; is there a way to do this without breaking it down and causing weird pigment separation?
It’s just a thought, but if you thin (dilute) the ink to flow through the airbrush, I do not think you will match the same color as you used undiluted to print with.
My reasoning is that a solid red would probably become pinkish when diluted. It will be interesting to hear if anyone has tried this before.
Rick
I agree with Rick……if you thin it that much, the color probably wouldn’t be the same which defeats your purpose of trying to get the same color. If you sprayed on a thick enough layer to get the same color, you could be spraying so much solvent along with the ink, that it might absorb into the paper and discolor it, in from the edge a ways. To minimize this, I would use a fast drying solvent which dries before soaking into the paper too much. (A disclaimer: I have little to no experience with airbrushing).
One other thing that can happen when inks are thinned a lot with solvent. [First a little background: the purpose of the ink vehicle (the uncolored varnish in the ink), is to surround the pigment and protect it and bind it to the sheet]. When you thin the ink a lot, there is no longer enough vehicle to protect the pigment (i.e. the vehicle can be washed off the pigment). Even after the ink is dry and you would think the vehicle would go back to protecting the pigment, it doesn’t always work this way. This can lead to an ink defect called chalking. The dried ink can tend to rub off like chalk would, if you used chalk. So, if you try this, I would do a test first, let it dry, and then rub it with a piece of white paper and be sure the ink pigment doesn’t excessively transfer to the white paper.