Hi. Today I want to talk about inks, I'm
going to look at water-based inks, Safe Wash oil-based inks and traditional
oil-based inks. Now there are loads of inks on the market and I'm only going to
talk about the ones that I know, so this won't be comprehensive by any means but
it will give you an idea. So, water-based inks and by that I mean that the ink
formulation is water-based and they clean with a damp cloth dipped in water,
there are various ones available, the ones that I teach with are by Lucas and
they used to go by the name Nerchau, but they are Lucas now and I find those a
good all-round ink, they come in these big bottles and they've changed the
lid and I don't particularly like it anymore, it's got a sort of little cap on
the top which is okay if you're on your own in the studio, but I use these for
teaching and so in order to make it easier for my students I put them into
bottles like this, this is a cosmetic bottle that I got on eBay I've got a
whole load of them on eBay and actually I would do this even if I
wasn't teaching because it turns faffing about with with the awkward bottle into
an easy little bottle with a much more effective lid to it. So let me just show
you what those inks are like, so here's one that I have mixed up, the Lucas inks
come in fairly basic colours so I like to mix up different colours for teaching so
my students have got a wide range of colours, so let's just squeeze a little
bit of that out sort of nice orangey-red and the other sort of ink that I've used is
Schmincke and Schmincke's water-based inks are again,
they're pretty soft and then finally the other ink that I've
got here and it's a metallic is by Speedball and I like their metallics this
one's separated out a bit, in fairness to Speedball I haven't used this in a
long time so I don't think that's their fault, I think that's my fault for
leaving it for a long time. Now all water-based inks are what I would call
quite soft, if you are used to oil-based ink like me then these seem very very
soft, you will see when we look at oil-based ones how much more stiff they
are, they're very soft inks when it comes to spreading them out and with the soft
inks like this it's really important that the rollers you use for them are soft
rollers because the softer the ink, the softer the roller, the better the result
you'll get. If you have a very hard roller and very soft ink like the water based inks
then it's very hard to pick up a nice cohesive thin layer of ink on your
hard roller, so with these ones I definitely recommend a soft
roller. There are additives for these inks you can get extender, Lucas inks
don't make an extender, Schmincke, I think, do and I've also found this in my
cupboard of tricks which is a Schmincke product and that's a gloss that you can
mix with the ink to make it glossier so that the finish is shiny and I think
Speedball do an extender, a transparent extender, to make the ink more
transparent and we'll look at the extender when we come to the printing, so
this would be mixed in with your ink and then when it was printed it would have a
glossy finish to it. Now these inks are compatible for mixing should you wish to
make a sort of reddish-brown the way to check if inks are compatible
is look at the way that you clean up. All of these inks here, reddish-brown with
some gold in it, all of these inks here clean in the same
way with a damp cloth and water and you can see you can mix
them together and use them. The other thing about water-based inks that I find
is that the colour you mix on the slab, when you put it on paper,
sometimes it's a little darker, a little edgier on the paper when you roll it out
so if I spread that out a bit if you can see that there's a slight colour variation,
so if you're using water-based inks I would always always have a bit of paper
to test your your colours on. People like these because they can be cleaned just
with water, they don't have any fumes, they dry quite quickly and that's why I
use them in class, the downside for me with water-based ink is that it can be
quite hard to use them on larger prints they can cockle the paper if you're
doing large areas of water-based ink and also if you, like me, do like painting with
little rollers and things like that these can start to actually dry on the
paper and get tacky while you're doing that and you can end up ripping the
paper when you come to print on your lino so the fast drying can actually be
a problem for me and my kind of printing. So although lots of people like them and
they're very convenient for me for teaching I would not opt to use these
over oil-based inks I think these are harder to use than oil-based inks so
we'll look at oil-based inks next and the ones that I use. The next two sorts of ink that I want to
talk about are both oil-based and they are the inks that I use in my work
there's two sorts there is traditional oil-based ink which is as it suggests
it's an oil-based and when you come to clean it it requires cleaning with white
spirit or mineral spirit to get rid of it, the other sort is also oil-based but
it's Safe Wash, this brand is called Caligo and it washes off with water or
soap and water, in my experience as long as you use a bit of elbow grease you
can clean this with just neat water. These two oil-based inks are compatible
you can mix them together if you want to, so I just want to show you they have
slightly different textures, so this one is the water washable oil-based ink, this
is the Safe Wash in the yellow and then this one is the oil-based, the
traditional oil-based ink. Now in a weak moment I bought this tube of violet ink
which I almost never use but it will do very nicely to show you textures. I feel that this violet I'll probably be
leaving that to somebody in my will I'm sure I won't have finished it by the time
I'm dead and gone. So if you look at the texture of this hopefully
you can see it's a stiffer texture than those water-based inks we looked at
just now, but it's still quite a nice soft texture, this traditional oil-based
is a stiffer texture I'm having to push the palette knife harder through that to move it around, so that is
stiffer and it's also affected by temperature on a colder day, we're
recording this in sort of fairly temperate June day, on a colder day the
oil based ink is even stiffer so it can be quite hard to mix on a cold day. So both
of these being oil-based take time to dry and one of the things I'm asked
about a lot is how you cope with such a long drying time, there are a couple of
answers to that the first is that I use very very thin layers of ink it's easier
to work with oil-based with thin layers which is another reason why I don't use
water-based inks, so these are oil-based inks you can roll out into incredibly
thin layers and the thinner your layer of course the quicker it takes to dry so
that helps, happens to be the way I like to print, so it suits me, the other thing
is that when your prints are hanging up to dry make sure there is movement in
the air in the room where they're drying, if you can, have a window open or have a fan
or something that moves the air around, because that's what will dry the print
if they are in a room where there's no movement in the air the
surface of the print won't dry it just sort of stays wet so having a little bit
of a fan or something to get the air moving makes a big big difference.
Then there are additives, dryers that you can add to the ink to speed things along
and they come in various forms, so the first dryer I'm going to talk about is
cobalt dryer, I'm sorry it's not in its little proper bottle I've changed it to
put it in a bottle with a dropper, so cobalt dryer comes in liquid form and
if I were going to make this ink dry with cobalt drier you need a scant drop,
that is more than enough for that amount of yellow ink,
it won't change the colour of the ink and you mix it in, probably that's a little
too much if anything, and that will speed up the drying time of this ink from
days to hours, it's really very very effective the price you pay with cobalt
is that it will make the ink shiny, it dries from the surface down and the
surface can get quite shiny when you're using it. The other sort of drier is
manganese drier and here it is in liquid form and you would add the same,
you are aiming at sort of like three percent, four percent so you could use a
manganese dryer. A manganese dryer dries out the inks and it's it
doesn't cause this much shininess, it will also speed up drying, but it doesn't
cause the shininess and you'd add it with a dropper same sort of quantity as
I've just shown you with the other dryer. The final product, which is what I use
now, and what I really really recommend is printmakers wax dryer, this is made by
Cranfield and this is manganese dryer, but it's suspended in a sort of, I don't think
it's wax but in a greasy compound and it's very effective
I would, for this violet, if I was drying out this violet I would use just
a little bit and mix it in and it would work very effectively to dry that ink
just a tiny bit of it. Having it in a greasy compound like this avoids the
problem you get with the other types that are liquid because the liquid types
are in spirit and so the spirit is sort of fighting the drying action of the
manganese or cobalt, so it's not quite as effective and this I just find
much easier to use and a much better product, but any of those
three will dry your inks quicker so that's one additive. The other additive
that you can get is called a tack reducer or wiping compound and this
looks very like Vaseline, squeeze a bit out and this will make your inks more
fluid so if I grab a bit of that and mix it in it will make your
inks runnier. Now the temptation is to rely on this wiping compound to make your
inks lovely and runny especially on a cold day when they're very very stiff,
actually I can take all of that, and it's making my ink
much softer and runnier, so, as I say, temptation on the cold day is to think
I'll stick a bit of wiping compound, tack reducer in with my ink and then it will
be soft and I can mix it up and it's lovely and easy to roll out, the problem
is that that will work nicely as long as you're in a cold studio and when you
roll out your inks and you take your print at first while the studio is cold
you'll probably get quite good results, but as the studio warms up it'll just
get runnier and runnier and not as good so I would be really careful, the only times
I would use this is for when I want to do a great big flat sheet of color where
there's no areas of fine cutting that might flood with ink and I want to get a
really cohesive layer of ink and then I might use this wiping compound, a little
bit of it to make that ink flow a little more so that I can get that one
wide sheet of flat colour, if it's a cold day and you're struggling with your ink
rather than adding this I would get the ink moving mix it as much
you can with a palette knife and then roll it out and keep rolling and the
action of the rolling will actually soften the ink and get it
behaving in a way that you want so that you can get your inking, so, yes, use that
carefully otherwise it can just flood everything and make a big mess. So
that's sort of general additives for manipulating the ink, the other additive,
although I wouldn't call it an additive, I would call it the main thing, is
extender and extender is a product, think of it like ink with no colour in it, that
will make the ink more transparent the more you add to it and we're going to
look at extender, I'm going to show you mixing colours and we're going to look at
extender then. So that is a very quick trot through inks and I'm going to do a
couple of films on mixing colours and using inks next. So I hope you've enjoyed
that and I hope you'll watch the colour mixing videos.
