Get Inked – Bookmark

Who doesn’t love a double entendre? Well, how about a triple in the form of a bookmark? It’s been awhile since I’ve printed with class starting up and working on a project in a hackathon over the weekend with the Agile League, an awesome group of Ruby developers. We put together a universal gamer score / community in just two days: GamerTribe.com. These guys are coding wizards. I decided to unwind after two solid days of development with this fun bookmark idea I’ve been kicking around for awhile and some whiskey I’ve been saving since Christmas.

This is my first attempt using magnesium plates, and I took a chance using a new platemaker, Hodgins Engraving. They have a very obtuse ordering system, but the plates were excellent and worked far better than my photopolymer attempts.

The plates come pre-mounted. This erased most of my past troubles of overinking and an unbalanced image impression that I had with photopolymer. Boxcar makes an excellent plate, but I didn’t use one of their aluminum bases, which sort of nullified the benefits of photopolymer. Plus, these pre-mounted plates look sexy in the press.

With the better impression, the distress present in the impression was scaled back, but I always like the unique hand made quality of random distress so I ended up loosening my platen for a slightly lighter impression.

Even with less pressure, the image came through great

The biggest mistake I made on this run was not letting the ink dry enough between prints, which caused the blue overlay to muddy a bit too much on some of the prints. Still, I was amazed at the clarity and detail the magnesium plates printed.

It’s not coming through very well in the image, but the tattoo on the middle leg is a heart that says ‘Mom’.