During my recent visit with owner of The Monkey Puzzle Tree, Charlotte Raffo, we made the trip from Leeds out to Anstey Wallpaper Co. Head of Sales, Shan, took us on an in-depth, two-hour, behind the scenes tour of the factory. I got to learn about the different printing methods Anstey uses, several of which Charlotte has used for creating her distinct wallpapers. Now I’d like to stumble along and try to explain some of these techniques to you!
Hit the North Cork, Disorder in Stasis, and She Chose Science are all printed digitally on massive HP machines. This is probably the easiest print method to understand as most of us have personal experience with digital printing. Thankfully, Anstey’s digital printers work signicficantly better than my own. Much like your own printer, ink cartridges feed the machine and print onto the paper. In order to get the depth of colour you see on your digitally printed wallpapers, this is actually quite a slow process as the machine passess over the paper multiple times for each section. Digital printing is one of the most commonly used and most economical processes for printing wallpaper. Anstey has been pioneering digital printing on different substrates including metallic backings and cork. They have also recently mastered the process of printing white ink on white paper (I barely understood this and won’t try to explain but it’s a big deal!).
Most recently Charlotte used the process of screen printing to print her vibrant art deco inspired “Blues Fantasia” wallpaper. This process involves a long (long!) table where the paper is stretched out. The pattern, one colour at a time, is then printed via screens, in sections to prevent smudging. The process of printing one section, waiting for it to dry, washing the screen, then filling in the blanks is time consuming. The more screens and layers of colour, the longer this process takes as it is repeated with each and every colour, with drying time between. 30 meters of Blues Fantasia took several men five hours to print.
‘Maitrise‘, a risque twist on a baroque motif, was printed via a technique called Flexographic printing. For me this is perhaps the hardest to explain, but I’ll do my best. This method of printing uses smaller amounts of paint applied by patterned cylinders. The cylinders almost looks like they have a very fine patterend mesh. These tiny mesh pockets pick up the ink and precisely apply the pattern to the paper. After each colour is applied the paper is sent through an oven to be rapidly dried before being fed through to the next machine. This next machine has it’s own cylinder which applies a new pattern with a new colour. This is repeated for each piece of pattern and colour.
Last, but not least, ‘Passion Flower‘ was printed in a process called Surface Printing. In this method machines apply liberal amounts of paint to patterened rubber cylinders which press onto the paper creating a pattern with softly blurred edges. This printing method does not leave drying time between colours and the paper is passed directly from colour to colour, pattern to pattern. This process of print has a similar affect to “potato printing” but on a much larger scale.
This is not an exhaustive list of the methods Anstey uses for printing wallpaper, though these are the only methods Charlotte has used for her wallpaper at this time. Other printing methods include gravure and block printing. One of the workers even set up the block printing machine just to show us how it works, but I think that is another post for another time. I hope you enjoying learning a bit about the process behind Charlotte’s luxurious wallcoverings. I sure did!