Friday I was on Press for the cover of a brochure I have designed for a new development at Wolf Creek Resort called Powder Canyon. I am blogging about it because it was quite a unique press check. The cover I designed is a simple one color print on one of my favorite brands of paper Reich Shine. Shine is a very expensive, luminouse, metallic sheet that also has a cool feel to it. My idea was to print a sort of corroded texture over top of the metallic copper paper to give it almost a rusted copper look. When I got there things were not at all as I had hoped. I had specified a pretty dark pantone brown for the single color print but the way the ink was going down and drying on the paper after a couple minutes the sheet looked very faded and washed out. As an artist my original inclination was to start adding black to darken up the color. This seemed to work but after a couple of press pulls we were noticing that despite our efforts the color continued to fade tremendously. Finally the printer suggested we start adding opaque white to the ink base to offset the natural transperancy that is part of most offset inks. This was the key and after a couple more pulls the color began to hold. I was worried after all the time it took to get to a color that was within my range of acceptability that maybe I had not gone dark enough, but I am looking at my sample sheet here on Saturday night and am pretty pleased with the overall color and effect.

My suggestion and bit of wisdom from the experience is that should a similar project ever occur to remember to switch from a tint base or transperant white to an opaque white as the Shine paper has a real tendancy to suck up color.

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