This weekend I was live printing at the Holiday Sale at Atelier Meridian in North Portland, which is always one part fun and one part awkward as I juggle trying to focus with trying to explain the process to people in a short enough time that no ink dries on the screen. I also get a case of the shaky hands while trying to get my registration correct underneath the mylar when other people are watching.
This print is one in a small series of giant foxes hanging around Portland landmarks. The foxes themselves are sort of like the giant, unobserved spirits of abandonded industrial structures. I have it in my head that occassionally other animals can see them, thus the cat on the roof (if you can find it). I've affectionately been calling the series 'Foxzilla'. I had printed this on buff BFK and white stonehenge, but I think it looks much better on the buff paper and thus will be making another edition of that at some point.
When I was doing a test print of this on Thursday I printed some layers out of order and did not quite get the same subtlety that I was hoping for. In this case all I had to do was lighten things up a bit and switch the order of some layers. I've been told this before but I always have to make mistakes twice before I remember the lesson: The layer that you print last is going to affect the color of the image more. For instance, if you're making green by printing transparent blue overtop of yellow, your green will be more blue because that was the color you printed last and vice versa.
With air dry inks I have been printing in the opposite order that I had used with the UV cured inks, i.e. printing the black layer last. The UV cured inks were transparent enough to print that black layer first, which makes registration a lot easier. With the more opaque speedball inks there's no way I would be able to do this, but I recently switched to Jacquard inks. I know this isn't the kind of situation where one follows their nose BUT the jacquard inks have the same stink as the UV and they lay down on the paper with a similar gloss. I suspect they may be transparent enough that I don't have to save my key layer for last. I'll have to wait for the next print to find out, alas.