Pressing Matters – All Mixed up

‘Where there’s printmaking, there’ ink. Fred Higginson of Print
‘Club London is here to shout about the skill of colour mixing.
“Dont leave it to guess work. Always keep a note or take a picture
of the colours you use. As you grow as an artist, your colour palette
becomes part of your signature and its no good if you can’t mix a
colour again when you need it,” he says.

Print Club’s in-house commercial printers, Tuckshop, are fastidious
about recording formulas for every colour they create. They use
Pantone colour reference books as a starting point, but pigment loses
a little bit of vibrancy each time you mix it, so mixing to a Pantone
base and then again to the desired colour isntt the best way to come
up with new colours. “It soon became evident that we needed to
throw out the rule book and start again,” says Fred. That’s when
Print Club Ink was born.

A150 mile jaunt up the M1 to Screentec HQ in Stoke-on-Trent
‘opened up a whole new way of colour mixing, and now they’re
sharing it with the world. Print Club has used Screentec water based
eco-friendly inks for over 15 years, and Fred is a big fan: “Frankly,
Thaven’t come across a better ink, so why change?” A few days with
their colour specialists (and several all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets)
resulted in eight triple-milled pigment inks spread evenly across the
colour spectrum which now form the basis of Print Club Ink. The
idea is simple: start with the most vibrant colours as building blocks,
and develop a free colour library that anyone can use. “We’re making
it really accessible with ‘how to mis’ tutorials and a platform for
people to show off their artwork and share their newly discovered
colours,” says Fred, “We hope you’ll be as excited about this new
approach to colour mixing as we are!”