Tag Archives: relief runners

Our Gunning etching presses have the incredible ability to print both relief and intaglio prints. We Print relief plates through the runner system we have developed to suit our presses.

Our printing runners come in many different thicknesses, they are hard wearing acrylic so they will last you thousands of prints. They are used to line your press bed, if you have one of our presses they come with a system that secures them to your press, and your top roller is dropped down onto your runners so you can just kiss your plate with your top roller.

When using runners, you should have a sandwich (packing paper, plate, print paper) at the same height or slightly higher than the runners so that when you pull your print through you are kissing the paper to the plate to create a perfect print. You can have your plate at the top of the sandwich and the paper you are printing on right next to the roller but if you find you get what looks like slipping you will want to put your plate at the bottom of the sandwich next to the bed. The thicker the runners and the more packing the likelihood of slipping reduces massively.

For example with the 4mm thick runners you will be able to print any thickness of plate up to around 4mm thick. For example, Hessian backed Lino is 3.2mm thick, easy cut Lino is 3mm thick. To print these thicknesses of plates with your 4mm thick runners you will just add the missing milli-meters by adding what we call packing paper on top or underneath your plate.

Are you wanting to print thick plates on your etching press? Our presses can fit up to 50mm through our rollers.

The runners we have developed provide a quick and easy switch from printing relief to intaglio. This method took years of printing to find out what does and doesn’t work, but we are so happy to have our simple method in place.

To purchase our runners you can find them here.

Thank you for reading!

Happy Printmaking!

All the best,

Ellie & The Team!

Tag us using the Hashtags…

@Ironbridgeprintmakers @Gunningetchingpress #GunningEtchingPresses  #GunningEtchingPress #JennyGunningPrintmaker

If you have read to the bottom of this blog you are entitled to a free gift, please email Jenny@IronbridgefineArts.co.uk with your preferred printing Relief or Intaglio to claim. Postage of £6.99 will still apply.