Damage the Rubber Blanket

Glass ID

With the theme of ‘error’ by offset printing, I used an unusable rubber blanket from the printing shop of the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle.

The rubber blanket of an offset machine works as an inter- mediate carrier, which allows the ink transferred from the printing plate to the material to be printed. Occasionally, a rubber blanket is damaged when impressions or scratches are left on it, for example, by folded or torn papers during the printing process. In fact, slight impressions or scratches on the rubber blanket have very little or no influence on the printing result. But in order to achieve consistent results throughout the whole printing process, such rubber blankets are considered as unusable.

On the rubber layer of an unusable rubber blanket, I carved four lines and used it for printing. However, there was no change with the print run of 50. The partially carved rubber blanket remained very stable. Presumably with a much higher print run or largely carved area, there might be changes during the printing process.

Also, I made further errors with the offset printing team:1. Push the red plate 2 mm to right
2. Manually mix yellow to blue to correct the tone
3. Separate printing