Ink studio · for conservators reading the wet front

Watch the ink decide.

Tidemark mounts every handscroll on one continuous rail and follows the pigment as it advances — logging each archival pass at the exact tideline where the wet front settles into fiber.

§ 01

One rail, read left to right

how a pass works
01

Mount

Lay the scroll flat and register it against the baseline rail before any pigment is read.

02

Wet front

A pass sweeps across; the luminous seam marks exactly where saturation meets dry fiber.

03

Tideline

Where the front recedes it leaves an iron stain — Tidemark seals it into the register.

§ 02

Every plate, mounted

the digitised scroll

The granulation is the record.

Saturation, pooling, and the iron tideline are captured in one read — not a flat scan but the ink's behaviour, the thing a conservator actually trusts.

Tidemark holds the wet state and the dried state side by side on the rail, so a folio's whole history reads in one sweep.

PASS 03 · FRONT 62% · GRANULATION HEAVY · SEALED
§ 03

What the studio tracks

this season
Wet fronts read
4,012

Across nineteen mounted folios on the Mogami collection rail.

Granulation maps
880

Each pass logged at the tideline, sealed once the pigment stabilises.

Tideline stains held
311

Permanent iron marks, registered and catalogued by conservator.

Ink is not placed on the page. It is let go — and the paper decides where the line will end.