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Issue Twelve Autumn 2026 Edition of 250, signed Stock Colorplan Ecru 270gsm Mesh 43T

Pull & Press

A quarterly for people who still smell the solvent. This issue is about overprint — what happens in the sliver of paper where cyan lands on magenta and refuses to behave like either of them.

Every article in issue twelve was separated by hand into three coarse screens and pulled on a manual four-arm carousel in a shed outside Leeds. Nothing here was proofed digitally. The registration drifts. That is the point, and you can drift it yourself with the console below.

  • 3 plates per sheet
  • 43T mesh count
  • 18s flash cure

Read the run Ink ledger

Press Console

Live separation controls — every plate on the page responds

The run — issue twelve, four pulls

  • Separation3 colour, hand cut
  • Screen angles15° / 75° / 45°
  • Flood strokes2 forward, 1 back

CyanMagentaOverprint · 2,400 words

The Third Colour Nobody Mixed

Put a forty-percent cyan dot under a forty-percent magenta dot and the eye invents a violet that exists in neither bucket. Printers call it the third colour. Chemists call it a coincidence. We spent four months in the shed trying to make it repeat.

The trick, it turns out, is nothing to do with pigment. It is dwell — how long the squeegee rests at the end of the stroke before you lift. A half second of hesitation and the magenta sits proud; a half second less and it sinks into the cyan and goes muddy.

Words · R. Okonjo
  • SeparationBitmap, 22 lpi
  • EmulsionDual-cure, 4 coats
  • Exposure9 min, 500W

MagentaKey · 1,850 words

Coarse On Purpose

Twenty-two lines per inch is an insult to a modern press and a gift to a twenty-year-old screen. At that pitch the dot stops pretending to be a continuous tone and becomes a shape you can count from across a room.

We asked eleven printers what pitch they default to. Nine said "whatever the file says." The two who had an opinion both said the same number, and both arrived at it by ruining a run in the same way.

Words · Marta Klein
  • SeparationSplit fountain
  • Off-contact3.5mm
  • Retarder4% by volume

CyanOverprint · 3,100 words

Notes From A Bad Registration

Sheet forty-one of a hundred came out two millimetres off and we kept it. Then sheet forty-two. By sheet sixty the drift had become a gradient across the edition, and the edition became a document of an afternoon rather than a set of identical objects.

Collectors hated it. One dealer returned the lot. The V&A bought two. We have stopped apologising for the ones that move.

Words · The Editors

Ink Ledger

Every ink pulled for issue twelve, with the overprint it produces when laid over the plate below it. Values measured off the dried sheet, not the tin.

Inks used in issue twelve with mix, coverage and overprint result
PlateInkMixCoverageOver black
Cyan Shed Process Cyan100% base38%Sinks to slate
Magenta Fluoro Rose 81292% base + 8% extender41%Holds, faintly warm
Overprint C over M, wet-on-dry—19%Reads violet at 2m
Key Carbon Key Matte100% base12%—