Gray? Why is My Carbon Black Printers Ink GRAY?
I feel artists are the best at reusing/repurposing wasted materials while simultaneously creating toxic waste products. Just the tiny amount of mineral spirits I use to clean up my etching ink is environmentally unfriendly. Yet, we use every glass jar, every emptied coffee tin and any expired phone book/magazine/newspaper we get our hands on. For a while I thought that was enough of a trade off and I didn’t feel too guilty about the sparing use of solvents and the scant bits of oil based ink I tossed in the trash.
Then I found Akua Water Based Ink in a catalog. A good range of colors and mediums made for intaglio and monoprinting. I ordered them up and got excited.
I love that this stuff takes forever to dry. I’m not being snide, it’s easy to clean and monoprinters will have plenty of time to do their thing before actually printing. It wipes fast on copper plates, so fast you wouldn’t even believe it. It does in fact wash up with soap and water just as advertised.
Down side, I simply can’t get over that this stuff looks and smells like children’s finger paint. After using Charbonel and Faust and Graphic Chemical, the loose consistency of Akua is a turn off. The softness of the ink made a mess of my high relief collographs, but I have yet to test it on more traditional collograph plates. Also, perhaps carbon black always turns into a watery blue gray plate tone because I have always used vine, bone and pitch, but…yuck! The umber is the same consistency and blending the different colors is predictably smooth, but the plate tone is also very cool.
I will upload pictures for comparisons sake and test the ink on my “K Type” prints and a copper plate with heavy aquatinting.
In summation; Easy clean, no annoying dry out issues, wipes fast off glass and metal, and loves Mommy Nature. Carbon black leans toward gray, can I get some vine out here?
Ready, set, print!
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