the cave that drips bird poop

the cave that drips bird poop, a photo by aznsparkle on Flickr.

printing day!

if my type setting had been perfect, it would've taken me an hour to ink the rollers and finish all my printing. but...i wasn't really prepared and had to make a lot of changes after proofing it once. just a space here or there....or a couple letters that didn't line up, but boy did that take almost 2 hours to fix, and i had to cut up my paper. after i had every single space accounted for....i started my run! the ink color looked the perfect shade of purple right after it came off the press.....but it dried a lot darker than i had imagined (once again looking black).

first letterpress experience

hi this is just going to be a test to see if i can upload pictures and what i want to write. i don't really know what to do right now i'm just testing out the colors....

mixing inks

wow. my first time mixing ink took a lot longer than i expected (about one hour)! i used the rubber-based inks instead of the oil-based because i have a lot of type but not a large amount of surface area to cover. i picked a pretty dark grayish-purple and the formula called for about:
     6 parts rubine red
     4 parts green
     1 part black
however, i think i started out with too much black! i ended up adding so much extra opaque white just to lighten it up a tiny bit. the color i was going for is close to the smeared out part in the picture above, but what it looks like on paper is the big glob part....basically black. as much as i tried to lighten it up, it still wasn't the purple i was going for.
note for next time: start with NO black and just add a little at a time.