Honus on Canvas - An experimentation with t206 ink colors and layering

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Originally Posted by steve B

Lightest to darkest is how it's supposed to be done.

But, it may not always be done that way.
For instance if a blue is mostly Opaque, and you want green it may be better to put yellow over the blue. *
What we can't know is where in the process any of the color oddities were removed or even if they were production items and not make-ready sheets or some variety of progressive proof.

Then there are cards that are consistent production varieties that could be taken as missing colors. (A good example is Dygert, who comes normally with and without red lips)

QC would have been done regularly during the days work. The place I worked at pulled an example from the press periodically to check registration and print quality. My brief time on a press I did it about every 5-10 minutes, the experienced guys only did that on finicky jobs. A case of having an easier job the better you got at doing it.


I believe the brown/yellows are most likely a progressive proof of sorts. Yellow would naturally be first, but why brown and maybe red? Because seeing the registration between a light blue and yellow would be somewhat difficult. Seeing it between any light color and a dark color is easier.
And since the plates were laid down by hand with Transfers, the first QC check is if the individual positions on the plate were located acceptably. Too far off, and you'd never get acceptable registration.
The ones with red- unless they all have those red traces, would be from a make ready sheet saved to be used for checking and adjusting the registration of red to the rest of the sheet. Red is printed left and low on the one Pat showed. I wouldn't consider it acceptable, but they did let worse out the door, so who knows what their standards were.

Clymer likewise is one I believe to be from a make-ready sheet.
Just with an additional color.

Downey is a neat card and illustrates a different point. They often used a peach/light tan color under the pink for faces.
Most legitimate color missing cards appear to be missing not only an obvious color, but a second color as well. This is true for Downey, as not only is the pink missing, but the peach as well. Even without seeing the back, I believe this is a production card that skipped a couple steps. It happens, we turned a corner to indicate the start of production sheets and the end of the make ready sheets. If the adjustments were good, we might remove the excess make-ready sheets if there were a lot of them. No point wasting ink on "junk". **

The cards I've looked at closely where they have doubled colors, like light blue/blue or pink/bright red all have the darker version over the lighter

*There are examples even in more modern printing, some 1981 fleer star stickers have a lighter blue printed over the black layer on the front. Rushed work? Put the wrong plate in the wrong spot in a multi-color press and just went with it? A puzzle for sure.

** This to me is possible evidence that some T206s may have been printed on a two color press, which was a cutting edge technology at the time. The printing company and the company that pioneered the multi color presses were close, so it's possible. Other than the prevalence of paired colors both in being missing and in registration I'm not sure how I'd prove that. There are also cards having only one color out of register, so it's not certain. (It's also possible that some series or print runs were done one way and some another.

Steve -

Thanks so much for the reply. It's awesome to have additional knowledge and context from someone who has directly worked with a press and seen how QC operates with print runs. I'm so glad you mentioned the possibility of skipping steps, because I definitely feel that many color variations can represent the presence of two colors that (in theory, because who really knows) probably were not sequential. I haven't even considered the possibility that the t206s could have also been one of the first to leverage a multi color press. That would certainly open a whole other can of worms.

Thanks for your comments and cheers!
BK