Printer advise needed & Hello!

[Ink stained Fingers]

it is not clear what happens with the pigment inks when you print them on top of each other - paper warping and slight dimensional changes is one effect - but how much does one ink cover up another ink - cyan on top of magenta - it's getting an unpleasant brownish look to what I remember and it's not getting a good cyan. But it may be all a matter of a test - even the lowest cost Epson workforce printers like the WF-2010W (A4) are running on a 4 color CMYK Durabrite pigment inkset.
It would be different with laser printer pigments - they are basically melted onto the paper in the heater/development unit, but that directly describes the risk for multiple print passes - what happens with the toner already on the paper in subsequent print passes - being removed again and picked up by rollers etc, how does the toner stick to the preprinted areas before it gets to the developer, it may work with one model, and only for a short time , or better with another one - that would have to be tested. And such preprinted paper may cause transport problems from its unevenness so I don't think that would be a reliable method - it would be overall a matter of 4 passes for the CMYK images.
I still think that it would be more reliable to create/edit the intended effects in a graphics program and then print that artwork on a printer the regular way - pigment ink printers like the Epson P600 or Canon Pro 10 should do a good job on suitable papers.

 

[The Hat]

First off, don’t try overprinting on a colour laser for two reasons, the first couple of sheets will work, because the machine is still cold, but after that the previously fused toner will stick to everything, and registration cannot be achieved from the paper cassette or by hand feeding, it won’t come close.

The intension of double or triple pass printing is not to mix colours but more to enhance the existing colours, because no matter how much colour you can lay down on a single pass, it sometimes is not enough, I also use to do this on Letterpress and Litho when Adam was a boy.

Later when the ink had dried you can print the rest of the image on top of the colours and add the rest of the surrounding text, I use Illustrator for each of the separate layers, and paper curl is not a problem if you use heavy stock boards...

This type of artwork printing can be exciting and fun but also very messy when it doesn’t turn out the way you planed, and it can go wrong and it does because its trial and error, error error...