0

Cart

I finally got round to printing some calling cards last night. I used the striking combination of black and red ink on a bright white Lettra 600gsm stock to create these cards. I’m planning on using different colours for the large headline on the reverse of the card, just it got late and after cleaning up the red, I didn’t want to put any more ink on the press.

[blockquote align=”right”]I was only printing a small area on pre-cut cards, so the Adana 8×5 was a perfect press for this job[/blockquote] I ordered my Polymer plates from Centurion Graphics and, as usual, they arrived the next day and were perfect. I have mounting blocks, but haven’t got round to cleaning them yet so I ordered my polymer plates ready-mounted to type high on MDF wood. This meant that I could just lock them up in a chase and print away. The beauty of polymer plates is that there is rarely a need for makeready, and this was the case here. I do enjoy the eternal jigsaw that is typesetting, but when there is a need for something that can be used again and again this method is much more convenient in my opinion.

I started with the black ink as I already had the press set up in this colour for another job and proceeded to print the contact details on the front of the cards. Following this, I let them dry for a while and had a play with another plate of a QR code for the website. This grapic looks really great letterpressed and I decided to use this as well as my details on some cards. Scanning this code with a smartphone will take you directly to this website. Not sure how I’m going to use it, but I thought it was cool.

Next up was the red. I got hold of a 1lb tub of (very) old letterpress ink from eBay. It took me about 20 minutes to dig out a corner of the skin that had formed on top of the ink. The tub is dated 1967, so I was impressed that there was any ink there at all. I love the depth of this colour and it printed really vibrantly as a solid. I’m looking forward to using it in other work.

Leave a Reply