OK, I’m not a total Luddite. (I’m writing this on a computer, after all.)

And I truly am interested in digital printing.

Up until lately, though, I haven’t much liked what I saw. But reading more the other day about carbon-ink printing on 100 percent cotton watercolor paper — and, especially, the fact that my old, unused Epson C88+ could be rejiggered with carbon inks — inspired me to give it a try.

As with all things digital, there is a learning curve. And as with all my previous digital printing experiences, the curve is very, very irritating.

But, on Friday, I finally got the C88 matched up with a continuous inking system from inksupply.com, which also provided me four bottles of varyingly intense warm-black inks. (Total cost, about $135, plus some days of waiting while they cheerfully diagnosed a chip problem on the ink cartridges…. don’t ask. Anyway, they’re working now.)

And on Saturday I spent about $20 at the local art supply store on nine full-sized sheets of good watercolor paper, which I cut down to 81 smaller sheets, each about 7.3 by 10 inches (a full sheet is 22×30, so do the math).

I bought a few sheets each of Arches coldpressed, Arches hotpressed and Canson Montval, all 90-pound thickness, which is thin for a watercolor paper, but I have had trouble getting 140-pound paper through the printer.

Results so far:

The Arches hotpressed paper, which is pretty slick to the touch, gives the cleanest, sharpest image, though that is not exactly what I am after for hand coloring. The coldpress paper is rougher and more interesting, but knocks contrast down a bit.

The Montval paper doesn’t work well at all; for some reason it shows significant banding in dark areas.

The image above was printed on the Arches coldpress and then hand colored with acrylics.

Yes, the wet paint smudged the image. This is a problem.

There may be ways to fix it, from using a spray-on fixative (yuck) to washing the finished but uncolored print in running cold water to remove  loose pigment particles (hey, one of the ideas of digital is not to have to wash prints….) to working more quickly with an initial coat of acrylic medium to seal the surface.

The color is not at all what I am used to. Whether that’s a bad or good thing remains to be seen.

In any case, though, I feel like I have an escape if good darkroom  photo paper disappears completely.

Photo: Ferns, 5×7 hand colored carbon pigment print, 2010