Letterpress 101: Colors

Printing Process

May 22

Color is an incredibly important aspect to designing for and producing on the letterpress. Here are a few tips to help.

Ink

The ink is an essential part of the letterpress printing process and your first step in color. Most retailers sell both rubber-base and oil-base inks, rubber for a slow-drying matte finish on uncoated papers and oil for a quick-drying, more glossy finish on coated papers. Ordering your ink in a specific Pantone color is an easy way to be certain that you’re going to get the correct color, though you can mix CMYK colors yourself as well.

Van Son Rubber Base Inks are a highly recommended letterpress ink option.

Solid Fills

As discussed in the previous post, letterpress ink is translucent, so solid fills will have paper show through. As such, overlaying multiple colors will result in being able to see both colors. This can be something to avoid, or it can add great quality to your design if used purposely.

Green and brown overlap in this design, adding dimension to the piece.

Only blue, red, and yellow inks are used here, but the colors are intentionally overlaid so that green and orange appear as well.

Metallic Colors

The luxurious feel and style that the letterpress achieves can make it tempting to pair it with an elegant gold or silver ink. Letterpress printing typically uses thick uncoated stock, though, which absorbs the ink and results in a flatter look. If you want a really shiny gold or silver, foil stamping is a better alternative.

In this example of a silver ink on the letterpress, you can see a little sheen.

We used a gold ink on this letterpress invite.

You can really see the difference between letterpress printing and foil stamping with this example of a gold foil stamped card.

Shading/Screens

Due to the relief printing technique the letterpress uses, it’s designed to print colors at 100%. Screens can be used, but they will be an obvious pattern because of the minimum line thickness. If you want to achieve a different shade, it’s best to use a second ink color.

This design appears to use different shades from a distance.

A close-up clearly shows the halftones and hatching patterns used to achieve that effect.

Color Bar

The pressure of the letterpress can vary, so it’s important to include a way to check color consistency in larger designs, especially ones that don’t have large fill areas otherwise. The easiest way to do this is to include a color bar, with alternating blocks of each color used.

An example of a color bar on one of the plates used in a two-color design.

You’ve probably got a million ideas for a new letterpress project by now, but what about the time and the cost? Check back next week for FGS’s Letterpress 101: Cost and Time!