![]() ![]() Also, the "ruler" is just cheap wood I had around the studio I used it because it is slightly lower in thickness than my blocks, allowing the baren a free "ride" over the printing area without fear of catching on the registration guides. ![]() I used cheap wood and simple staples to see if the board worked okay for printing but I was careful to use a square at every step to make the board corner and the kentos a true 90 degrees. The wood guides are glued with white glue, also steady but removable with a bit more effort. They are glued with paste so they just come off by a bit of soaking and scraping. You can see the margins of the tiger prints in burgundy matboard. If I want other margins, as for the tiny tigers, I just glue kento-mat-board to the board at the appropriate distance. So I made a prototype of wood with a 1 inch margin wood paper guides built in. When I started printing with waterbased pigment, the dampness of the whole process was not compatible with a foam-board registration jig. With a well-built registration board, the only but very important requirement is that the blocks have to be cut perfectly square, the paper has to be cut perfectly square and the placement needs attention, but no more attention than if placing paper on a standard cut kento. Seems that every kento in every block could introduce some error into the registration process and I would rather spend a little time upfront into building a semi-permanent movable kento. There is some error introduced in that the block has to be placed exactly in the same place every time, but in my experience this is less prone to error than having to cut exact kentos in as many as a dozen or more blocks. Any two pieces of material glued together as a square corner, then another piece of material as a paper guide glued at some pre-determined margin. A registration board is simply a "movable kento" system of registration. I've made them mostly of foam-board so that they could be fed through the etching press (or hydraulic press). In Western printing, long ago I started using registration boards. I'm sure the masters, er, mastered this kento cutting so that they were identical for every block. But I believe this way of doing things introduces a margin of error for every single block that is cut. Don't get me wrong, I have faithfully cut kentos in every block just like the old methods explain. Being an over-efficient maniac, one of the things that has always bothered me when printing a la Japanese, is the registration method used in moku-hanga.
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