We've spent quite a bit of time over the last weeks debating the pros and cons of the various types of ink one can use in Letterpress printing.
The main options are Oil-based, Rubber-based, Soy-based or Water-based, which all have their positives and negatives, and you can certainly find champions and detractors for each type of ink. There's a great discussion of the salient points over here on Inky Dog Press, if you're interested in reading further.
Given that we're only going to be printing in our kitchen (to start with at least), we figured that having to clean up with solvents probably wasn't ideal, and so decided to stick with water washable inks for now. Of course, not using solvents for clean-up also has much less of a negative impact environmentally, which certainly makes me happy.
We've elected to go with these Caligo Safe Wash Relief Inks:
The advantage of these coming in tubes minimizes the amount of wastage from skinning over that we would see in a tin, as when the ink is exposed to air, it will start to dry out.
We're trying to be strict with ourselves about not splurging too much money on this new hobby, so we decided to go with 5 basic colours for now, as above. These will combine to give us more than enough range for our initial experiments though, I'm sure.
Next post we'll actually get to some printing, I promise!
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