Phil, Out of Register

On a real press, the four ink plates are supposed to land in exactly the same spot. They don’t always. Paper slips, a roller stretches, and the colors peel apart at the edges. That’s the halo around faces in old comic books.

Here every plate of Phil’s portrait rides its own spring: black the stiffest, yellow the loosest. Thumb on the sheet makes the inks slide toward your cursor by different amounts, so color fringes peel out of his edges and spring back when you move on. Loose press lets a hard swipe knock whole plates out of line, and you watch them wobble back into register. Reach, Pull and Wobble change how it feels, and you can switch plates off to watch one ink misbehave at a time.

This is the second of three Phil pieces, after Phil, in Four Inks and before Phil, Hand-Colored.

What I’d like to hear: which feels more like a real press going wrong, the thumb or the shake?