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I walked to La Dominotería in one of tose spring afternoons that gives the winter. Besides a beautiful shop full of amazing papers, there I met Maria del Mar, who helped me to choose the paper for screen printing and materials to prepare the protective little folders. I am always amazed when I encounter an expert at something. It’s great how, from a vague description of what’s on your mind, someone with expertise can understand what you want and bring you something that, even without knowing it existed, appears to be just what you wanted. Such was the selection process of the cardboard and japanese paper that make up Roberto protection.

My initial idea was to leave 1cm margin between the edges of the silk screen and the edges of the protective folder, and Maria del Mar offered herself to cut the material with its superguillotine. We realized that it was best if the cardboard had the same measure than the envelope, to make it fully seated and not bend during shipment. As I still had not bought the envelopes and the paper for the screen printing was my priority, I left the cardboard and the Japanese paper in the store with the intention of returning when I knew the exact size of the envelopes.

I wrote to Eduardo from Hola por qué warning him that I already had the paper, and we arranged to meet the next day in the study. In La Dominotería had not dared to cut the paper for screen printing because maybe in the shop needed to work with other measures, margins or whatever, and I had assumed that in the printing studio would have a guillotine as in the paper shop … Big mistake, because Hola por qué use to works with paper suppliers who send the material cut.


Poor Eduardo covered his face with his hands when he saw that I had taken the paper uncut and he had to cut each of the 50 little cards …




Leaving aside this little tragedy, we took the opportunity to choose inks. The screen printing process does not work as the 4-color process at printing press, which by combining four basic colors (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) gets the definitive color, but for each tone of the design uses a different ink.

To give you an idea, if Roberto had come out of a printing press would have sufficed 4 photolithograph, and the final colors would have been obtained only at the end, when the sum of the different proportions of basic CMYK colors were printed. That is why in this system each ink contains a percentage of gray as a function of the amount of primary color participating in the final color, from 0% (white in photolithograph) to 100% (black in the photolithograph). In screen printing, however, each particular photolithograph is defined by the area that lets the ink at 100% (black) or 0% (white). This would be Roberto in photolithography (above) and this is in screen printing (below):

So, looking among the thousands of screen printing ink cans that fill the shelves of the study, and checking on the final appearance of the inks when printed, Eduardo and I chose the 6 inks for Roberto.

My visit was over, and it only remained to wait for Eduardo to cut the paper and receive the photolithograph to begin to work. Before leaving, I asked Eduardo a favor: to get photographs of the process. No problem. He told me that they always try to document their work, and also there was no objection to take my own pictures during the process. As it is usual to make one or two at most inks per day, we agreed that he would take care of the first inks and warn me to photograph the last ink (black).

Again I left the studio really happy, enjoying more than ever the closeness of the day that Roberto would finally be on paper. And all this time, I had to keep in secret what I was dying to share with you, and just launch small pills in my social network without revealing the surprise … Argggggg!

[TO BE CONTINUED...]