Industry
4 points worth checking on home printmaking projects
Four checks that decide whether a home printmaking project holds up: time split, fault clustering, material shelf life and the rights on every source image.
What to take away
- Four checks decide whether a home printmaking project holds up: the time split across tasks, fault clustering, the shelf life of your chemistry and paper, and the rights on every source image.
- Printing is a small share of the hours. Preparation, coating, drying and admin eat the rest, and that is the number people get wrong.
- Rejects cluster around two or three causes. Name them once and the next edition costs less.
- Rights questions arrive the moment work goes public. Settle them before the show, not after.
Check one: time split by task
Log hours in four buckets: preparation, printing, drying, admin. On most home benches printing is the smallest of the four.
A three-hour session at the press can sit on top of six hours of tearing paper, mixing ink, coating plates and waiting. Price the project by press time alone and you priced it wrong.
Preparation carries most of the named costs. A 4-inch Speedball soft rubber brayer runs about $15. A 225 ml tube of Cranfield Caligo Safe Wash relief ink sits near $25 to $30, and a 22x30 inch sheet of Rives BFK costs about $8 to $10. Tearing paper by hand adds time, not money.
Record the split for one project. It changes how you schedule the next one more than any new tool will.
Check two: fault clustering
A first edition might yield one usable print in three. By the third or fourth edition that improves sharply, then settles.
Skill vs material faults
Skill limit
- When
- Early editions
- Fix
- Practice
- Example
- Inconsistent pressure
- Cost
- Time
Material limit
- When
- After plateau
- Fix
- Replace part
- Example
- Worn blanket
- Cost
- Under $10-$30
The rejects left after the plateau are usually a materials or equipment limit, not a skill limit. That is a different problem with a different fix: a worn blanket, a dull gouge, a plate past its useful life.
Speedball replacement blades typically cost under $10 a set, so a #1 V gouge that skips is usually a blade, not your hand. Gelli Arts plates pick up lint and dents, and an 8x10 plate near $30 lasts longer stored flat under acetate.
Write down the three faults that cost you the most sheets. Our taxonomy of print faults supplies the names to file them under, which makes the pattern visible across projects instead of within one.
Check three: shelf life of chemistry and paper
Cyanotype sensitiser, gelatin plates, gum arabic and ink all carry a shelf life, and a shared studio rotates stock faster than a home bench does. Two printers can run identical exposures and get different results because one bottle is a season older.
Shelf-life checks
- Check date on every container
- Cyanotype sensitizermix and use within days
- Store paper flat, away from damp
- Keep Gelli plates flat under acetate
- Store chemistry per safety data sheet
- Dispose via hazardous-waste authority
Check the date on every container before you start, not after a failed run. A Photographers' Formulary or Jacquard cyanotype kit costs roughly $25 to $40, and its sensitizer holds best mixed and used within days, then stored dry and dark.
Papers age too. Rives BFK and Stonehenge, around $8 and $5 a sheet at 22x30 inch, want flat storage away from damp or they cockle and mold. Gelli Arts plates collect dust, so keep them flat under acetate between runs.
Store chemistry per the manufacturer's safety data sheet, and route anything you are discarding through your municipal hazardous-waste authority rather than a drain.
Check four: rights on every source image
A project stays private until it does not. Once work goes onto a website, into a show or into a shop, the source of every image becomes a question worth having already answered.
Federal government works are handled differently from most material: the statute states plainly that copyright protection is not available for any work of the United States Government, though the government can hold copyrights transferred to it.
A public repository is not the same as a public domain guarantee. The National Archives is explicit in its copyright and permissions guidance that not all records in its holdings are in the public domain. Some carry copyright or donor restrictions, and determining an item's status rests with the user.
Read the terms on the file page, not the site banner.
The Met's Open Access program and Smithsonian Open Access release images of public-domain works under CC0. Library of Congress free-to-use sets and Flickr Commons mix cleared and uncleared items in one search result, so print only what you can trace to a stated license or an expired term.
Worked example: reading your own record
Say a project logs P hours at the press, D hours drying, and R rejected sheets out of T pulled. Cost per usable print is total spend divided by (T minus R). Substitute your own figures.
Run the same arithmetic on your second project and compare the two. The only reliable benchmark in a home practice is your own previous record.
Our set of single-skill exercises is the fastest way to shorten the fault list before the next edition.
Common questions
How long does a first small edition really take?
Longer than the press time suggests, usually two to three times once preparation and drying are counted. Log one project honestly and your estimates improve for years.
Is it worth recording hours at all?
Yes, once. The value is in the direction the numbers move between projects, not in the first figure, which is usually unflattering for everyone.
What if my numbers look bad?
They will. Compare your second project against your first rather than against somebody else's published result, which you cannot check anyway.
Should I publish the record?
Publishing your own numbers is useful to other printers. It also forces the four checks above to be honest, because someone else can read them.
