Hot off the press and very very wet, these are simple cards for Jess Tully at Studioilse, to market their ‘furniture that brings people together’.
We’re literally watching the printed stack every five minutes, to see how fast the ink sets. Although we’re using special oxidising-only foil inks (vegetable oil based), printing on a material like this – 500 micron rough greyboard – is quite tricky.
It may seem counterintuitive, but litho ink sets much faster on coated paper than it does on uncoated. That’s because the solvent and oil in the inks is sucked up quickly by a china clay based coating, whereas paper fibre barely absorbs them at all. Sometimes we have to wait several days before the work is dry enough to finish (creasing, cutting, binding). Sometimes we even have to wait days between printing one side and printing the reverse.
Such are the perils of life as a printer. It doesn’t mean the clients won’t want their printing today, and in this case it really is today. Doesn’t help that we use printing inks with a very low level of additives such as cobalt compounds, which are conventionally added to catalyse oxidation and have nasty environmental impacts.
