Weird Poster Visuals

I thought I’d share a couple of strange visual things which I experienced recently.

I spent the day printing the final colours on my new landscape print. The final colour is a slightly darker version of the previous colour. It’s quite subtle but creates a nice effect.

Now ink often dries a little darker than it looks ‘in the pot’. Even though I’m well aware of this I was still taken by surprise when the freshly printed ink matched almost exactly with the layer underneath — I printed a layer, lifted the screen, and did a double take as it looked like I hadn’t printed anything at all.

Fresh ink

As I realised what had happened, I simply waited a few moments and as the ink dried, it grew s l o w l y darker like it was magically appearing right before my eyes. Quite an interesting and strange visual occurance!

Dried ink, now the correct slightly darked colour

The second instance of my eyes playing tricks on me happened when I got home.

On the wall of my studio room I have a framed copy of the 2019 Green Man festival poster. It’s a 3 colour print and one of my favourites of the collaborative ones we’ve designed.

As I glanced up at the wall my eye was suddenly drawn to the bottom right of the poster, where there are some flowers on a textured background.

It was completely popping out in 3D, like I was wearing 3D glasses!

The effect was very strong and incredibly convincing. I actually reached out to touch the perspex of the frame. What the hell?!

The framed poster
How the 3D effect looked!

This was incredibly strange and I cannot over emphasise just how convincing the effect was. I think a weird combination of the evening light and my contact lenses caused the background texture to behave like an autostereogram. When I looked at it later (wearing my regular spectacles) the effect was no longer apparent and, thankfully, the poster was behaving itself normally.

I wonder if any other printers have experienced similar strange visual effects?

Thanks for reading!

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