I am printing out a book of my dad's creation, a collection of cartoons that he has made over the past year. Printing it on 110 lb. Georgia Pacific cardstock creates a wonderful image, and a nice, hefty, quality-appearing pile of paper. After binding these things, they'll look real spiffy. It's inexpensive versus getting a Book Printer to make it for me, that's for sure. I'm only making 10 of them right now.

The problem is that my Canon i560 uses water-based ink, like most inkjet printers. Something that I learned about water-based ink is that it doesn't really... ever totally dry on it's own. Within the ink mixture, there is a substance called a "humectant" which is a fancy hydrophilic oil-like substance that stops the ink from encrustulating on the surface of the printer's head.

The humectant is absorbed by the paper and thusly, dries. However, ink that is on the surface of the paper, still has a layer of humectant on it, because this ink has not been absorbed by the paper (due to saturating the paper underneath it with enough black already). Because that layer of oil is still on there, moisture in the air is trapped on the surface by it's hydrophilic nature. This is enough moisture to cause smudging when two pieces of paper with ink touch each other surface-to-surface.

I'm not into making smudgy books.

All I have is this inkjet printer, the paper, and very little money to get books made in a proper fashion. However, since this is a problem that deals with materials in the material plane, there must be a materials-based solution that escapes my mental grasp.

One of the things I've tried is taking poster-tack (an adhesive, kneeded eraser-like compound you can buy at the stationery store) and used it to rub the humectant off the surface of the page. This produces a veritably smudge-free effect, but it does take 20% of the ink "out" of the paper, and it is excessively tedious. 500 pages of erasing isn't something I wish to do.

An interesting property -- The poster-tack, when pressed against an ink-saturated area, sticks lightly to any area with humectant still on it. If I press onto a small black dot, and pull the poster-tack away, there is a small dot-shaped pull-mark on the surface of the tack. If I do this several times, the pull-marks stop appearing and the ink will no-longer smudge, no matter how tough I rub.

Another thing I've done is to put pieces of paper inbetween each double-sided printed sheet of the book in order to blot the humectant off. This works, but is only 20-25% effective over any period of time, and smudging still occurs.

Strangely enough, I've NEVER experienced any smudging with any World Works pieces I've printed out. I know that I've rubbed the surfaces hard enough! What the heck?!

It would be peachy if somebody could lend me some advice on this matter. I promise I'll give it back when I'm done with it.

An oldschool graphic design trick (and I think the solution to your problem) would be to spray each sheet with Krylon or a similar sealant: http://www.misterart.com/store/view.cfm ... &store=003 . The most important thing here is to seal in the ink and residuals to prevent smudging.

I've used Krylon on many art pieces in mixed mediums that I didn’t want to smear. Hope that gives you a direction to follow.

A sealant is a good idea. It would work... sorta. However, I need to cover 66 square feet of paper per book (possibly 12 oz. of sealant --> $6-7 per book extra) to get an even coat on the paper, otherwise some parts of the surface would feel plasticky-smooth while others felt papery. It'd be great if I had a magic stencil that could [i]just[/] cover the portions of the paper with black ink on it.

Some sort of oil-negating powder would be ideal.

Another thing too; spray sealant is stinky! That's okay for a piece of sealed art behind some glass and a frame, which has sat and dried in a large room for a week, but for a book that is held and is up close to the face, probably less ideal. If I could get the books to smell like Magic: TG cards, I wouldn't mind that. Too bad that's the smell of real lithographic printing ink!

I like that Krylon price though.., $3 a can is better than I've paid for acryllic sealant. I'll remember that tip.

How about baking the pages, to boil off the water, beneath? Try laying the pages on a teflon-coated, cookie sheet, and heat them at 220-F for 10 minutes. Use an experimental sheet of print, which you don't care about, then perfom the smudge test. Best of luck! Cheers!

Aside from the cost "Workable fixitive" (I think that's what its called). Was excellent for this sort of work. I had alot of Charcoal and pastel drawings in an
art sketch notebook, and that stuff easily smears. Well this spray saved my butt. It's really durable, lasts an extrmely long time and gave the pages otherwise only a slightly more shiney look. (Think satin, and less glossy). And It doesn't give much of a smell at all, if any.

I would think the cost could be reduced by the # of cans purchased. And why not make a template for even page area coverage. Like 7.5" x 10" area cust out of a sheet of vellum or some such. That way it would be semi-transparent and easy to line up.

Drying under some 100watt bulbs for a 20-30mins or heat lamps might do the trick(or the ..cure..?). Though I'd be worried about warping if the process is too quick.

Did you try letting it dry for a few days near a window?

Thoughs to chew on anyway...

-The Floyd

...GRR! Double posted somehow!

Hmmm, a method that I used many years ago for art maps was to take a piece of white blotting paper, lay it over the printed page and use an iron on it. This soften the humectant, and lifts it from the paper. Do not use a colored blotter, the softened humectant will leach it from the paper and create smudges. (The first blotting paper we used was green.) The inks that were used for lithography like the maps we were making also contained a humectant, to prevent them drying on the press. In the case of the maps the iron was a big fold down thing like a flat waffle iron, but it was still called an iron.

Hope that this helps.

The Auld Grump, gods that takes me back...

How soon after printing are you trying the blotter? We went straight from the stone to the iron, so it may be a time issue, or even a paper issue - I no longer recall the details but the paper for lithography was expensive (at least partially because it had to be certified 'acid free', these were supposed to last).

So play around with paper as well, and as a last resort see if the discount inks work better, I know that friends have complained that they dry out faster in the cartidges, so it may be a lack of what you do not want.

The Auld Grump