The four blues, and the one that fought back

I almost binned the proof on Tuesday afternoon. Four blues laid down in sequence and the last one wouldn’t cooperate — under the studio bulb it read grey, almost violet at the edge, nothing like the swatch I’d mixed an hour earlier. The paper looked tired. I looked tired. The press, blameless, kept turning.

Here’s what I’d like to walk through this month: the colour theory I used (and what I ignored), the three test pulls that taught me where the actual problem was, and the question I now ask before mixing a four-colour print: what is the studio light doing to my decisions?

The setup

The new edition is a quiet thing. Four blues, no other colour, on a soft cream Zerkall. The idea is to walk the reader from a near-black indigo at the top edge to something that should look like a sky just before the sun comes up — a blue that’s really mostly air.

The problem with mixing colour by daylight is that you’re mixing for a moment that won’t exist by the time the print is dry. The studio bulb is a fact you have to design with, not against.

I sketched the gradient on a piece of newsprint first, which is something I almost always skip and almost always regret skipping. The newsprint test held up under tungsten, fluorescent, and the cool LED I’d been using through the worst of January. The plate test — one careful pull on white paper, no edition number, just to see — held up too.

What I tried

Three things in order. None of them was the right answer on its own, but the third gave me enough to finish the edition:

• Re-mixed the fourth blue with a small amount of warm linseed, looking for body rather than hue.
• Moved to the south-facing daylight bulb I usually keep for late-stage proofing.
• Switched paper for one test — a slightly more absorbent Hahnemühle — to see whether the issue was ink-on-paper or ink-on-ink.

The third test was where I learned the most. The fourth blue wasn’t the problem; the third blue’s drying time was. It was still tacky enough to hold the fourth pull just slightly above the paper, scattering the light differently and reading cool-grey rather than soft-blue. Three minutes of extra dry time would have fixed it — and would have meant ten extra minutes per pull across the edition.