How to choose materials for independent print studios

What to take away

Standardize, then stock

A solo printer can keep six inks and four papers. A studio with fifteen members should not, because every extra product is another safety data sheet — the manufacturer's sheet listing a product's hazards, first aid, storage and disposal — plus another storage decision and another cross-contamination path.

Pick one relief ink family, one screen ink family, two papers and one cleanup route, and buy those in quantity. Workable standards are Caligo Safe Wash or Akua Intaglio for relief, Speedball water-based ink for screen, and Rives BFK or Stonehenge for paper; Blick Art Materials and Graphic Chemical & Ink both stock them. Members who want something else can bring it, subject to a rule that anything brought in comes with its safety data sheet and leaves with its owner.

If the studio also runs alternative processes, give that chemistry its own standard: a cyanotype sensitizer — ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide — with its own trays, its own measuring cups and its own closed storage, never the trays that hold ink.

Standardizing also makes faults legible. When fifteen people print with the same ink on the same paper, a problem that appears across several of them is a studio problem worth investigating. When everyone uses something different, the same evidence looks like fifteen unrelated bad days.

Labels that carry legal weight

Household and art products sold in the United States carry warnings under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act and the labeling rules made under it, which specify wording rather than leaving it to the manufacturer. The list of products requiring special labeling — 16 CFR 1500.14 — names specific substances, among them benzene, toluene, xylene and petroleum distillates, and states what the label must say for each. Those labels carry a signal word — DANGER, WARNING or CAUTION — a statement of the principal hazard and the words "Keep out of the reach of children."

A warning label does not automatically mean unsafe, but it does tell you exactly what the product contains. A cleaner marketed only as citrus may not.

Cleanup comes down to the ink itself, and water-based versus oil-based printmaking ink changes what a studio stores and vents. Water-based screen ink and water-washable relief ink rinse off tools in a sink fitted with a sediment trap. Oil-based and solvent-based ink needs a covered solvent bin, a window or local exhaust running while the lid is open, and the spent solvent decanted into a labeled container for household hazardous waste rather than poured down the drain.

The second-hand furniture question

Studios furnish themselves from what they can find, and painted wood from before the modern rules can carry lead paint. The Consumer Product Safety Commission's ban on lead-containing paint and certain consumer products bearing it, at 16 CFR 1303, dates from the late nineteen seventies, so anything older than that is worth treating with caution.

The rule for a studio is simple: do not sand, scrape or heat old painted surfaces. Clean them, seal them, or replace them. A plan chest with intact old paint is fine. The same chest being stripped in a corner of a shared room is not.

Stock control that works

Keep a single shelf list with product, size, supplier and the date the last one was opened. Assign one person to it. Count the shelf once a quarter rather than trusting the list. Studios run out of the one thing everybody assumed somebody else had ordered.

Our studio watchlist puts that review on a schedule. Our guide to choosing the materials a print room is built from covers the surfaces, seals and containers those consumables sit on.

Write the standard list on the wall next to the shelf. Members buy what they can see named, and an unwritten standard erodes within a term as people substitute whatever the nearest shop had.

Common questions