Transparent inks

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, with current projects, and thought I’d throw it out there. I find that when I’m working with an ink color that is made up primarily of transparent white (and I use all oil based inks), it’s better to print your darker color first and then overprint with the mostly transparent ink. I ran a test a number of years ago where I printed the transparent color first and then overprinted with dark text and vice versa. When you overprint with the darker color, it often pools on top of the transparent ink color and just doesn’t look as nice. I find that printing the transparent color last really doesn’t make such a difference as if you had done it first, but then any little discrepancies are welcomed when printing letterpress. Just thought I’d throw that out there in case anyone likes to print with transparent colors as much as I do! My apologies if everyone already knows this.

This is a great tip. You’d think that it wouldn’t matter with a transparent ink, but hard experience teaches otherwise! Thanks for saving us from having to learn the hard way. :)I did a couple pieces last year that called for saturated, jewel-like color that was still translucent (not quite the solids found in the Pantone book), so we found that mixing the colors with transparent rather than opaque white kept the color strong, but gave it the trendy jewel tones we were going for. Looks like those colors are going to be around this fall as well, judging by the Pantone projections!

thanks kseniya, I was just going to print with some jewel tone colors this evening and I may try it with some transparent white and see how it looks.

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