Ink recipes worth keeping

A colour you mixed once and loved is only useful again if you wrote down enough to mix it a second time. Ink on a palette looks different from ink rolled thin on paper, and memory of a colour fades faster than most printmakers expect. A few minutes spent recording a mix while it's still on the slab saves an afternoon of guessing later.

What to record

A recipe worth keeping down includes:

• Base inks and proportions. Which tube or tin, and how much of each, by parts or by weight rather than "a bit of this."
• Modifiers. Extender, tack reducer, drier, and how much of each. These change how the ink handles and dries as much as the colour itself, and are easy to forget once the print is done.
• Paper. The same ink reads differently on different stock; a recipe tested on one paper isn't a promise on another.
• Weather, or at least the season. Humidity and temperature change drying time and tack. An ink that behaved well in a dry studio in January may skin over faster, or stay open longer, in a damp August.

Why a swatch matters

Write down the recipe, but keep a physical swatch too, a small rolled-out sample on the same paper you tested. Colour names and even mixed ratios drift from what you remember once you're a few weeks and a dozen other prints removed from the original mix, and a screen or a photo under different light will lie to you in ways a swatch under studio light won't. A swatch is the actual record; the written recipe is what lets you reproduce it, and the two together are more trustworthy than either alone.

Reusing a recipe months later

A recipe without paper and season noted is a rough guide at best when you come back to it later. If the swatch and the notes agree with what you're seeing on the palette this time, you're probably fine; if the ink behaves differently, check whether the paper or the weather has changed since you first mixed it, before you assume the recipe itself was wrong. The iPad app's Studio Log keeps this as a searchable ink recipe library, with a swatch photo, the paper it was tested on, and the date, so a mix from last year is as easy to find as one from last week. See Studio log.