Printing a Fountain Pen

We’re hosting a meeting of The Pen and Pencil Club of Prince Edward Island in the print shop in Saturday night, and in service of that I’m preparing an original lino print of a fountain pen—a Nemosine Singularity—that all who attend will get to print the final colour of, and then take the print away to assemble into a notebook.

I’m printing these on the new-to-us etching press, an experience that’s got a very different feel from the unrelenting breakneckery of the Golding Jobber Nº 8 letterpress. “Slow printing,” you might call it.

The pen itself looks like this:

I made a pencil sketch of the pen; the transparent body made for a more interesting sketch, as I could show the inner workings:

Using carbon paper, I traced the sketch onto a 4”x6” piece of battleship linoleum, and the, to start, carved away everything except the body of the pen:

To test the carving, I pulled a print of this in black:

I made some minor adjustments to the carving, and then printed 30 copies, using Ternes Burton pins for registration, and Akua transparent base with a single drop of blue for the ink:

Next I carved away everything I wanted to remain the very light blue background colour:

I overprinted my initial prints using Speedball silver ink:

Finally, I carved off the nib of the pen—the only part I wanted to remain as silver—and ran the prints through again, this time using Akua carbon black:

Here are each of the three stages of the print for comparison:

I ran only one print of the black layer, as we’ll invite the “pen night” folks to print this layer themselves tomorrow night. I turned that print into a prototype notebook: