Clear Matte Precoat from inkAID
Last year inkAID introduced a new product Clear Matte Precoat. In the last couple of weeks I have been using the coating on a variety of surfaces. These surfaces include: recycled beverage cans, hand made bark paper from kozo fiber, hand made cheesecloth skins, metal mesh, pima tex cotton, organdy, lace paper, lutradur and recycled printers plates. I tested it on surfaces next to inkAID’s Semi Gloss Precoat, Pearl Iridescent and Type ll since these are my most used coatings.
Clear Matte gives a translucent, matte finish which allows the underlying image to show through. If you have a dyed or painted surface, the colors will show through on the print creating an overprint. Depending on how dark the colors are on the surface of the fabric or paper, you will see sections of the print or not.
What I found with my printing is that on porous fabrics such as organdy, the clear matte will give a slightly clearer print then the semi gloss. When printing on metals and cans, it has a nice matte finish, but still allows the shade of the metal to show. In some cases it is hard to see the difference between the coatings used. I encourage you to try it on the surfaces that you like to print to see what you think. It’s always good to see how coatings perform on various surfaces.
As with all the inkAID coatings Clear Matte results in a quality print. It has some adhesive in it, so it is safe to use on metals, but may show tracking with pizza wheels from some printers. I had none of that going on with my prints. Each print was professional quality with a clear bright image. My printing was all created on my Epson 4800. I printed the same image on all the surfaces so that it could be easily compared.
I loved the comparison of Type ll, Pearl and Clear Matte on the recycled beverage cans. All 3 of these coatings created a beautiful print on the cans. For more information on using inkAID products on fabrics and specialty papers see my workshop, “Getting Started with Digital Prints on Uncommon Surfaces.”
Assembling Digital Prints on Beverage Cans
Finished printing 100 more cans to add to this piece. Still haven’t decided if I will wire them all across, or keep them in rows the way they are. Regardless, I am assembling the pieces that are ready to go. The print for this piece is from the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park.
Here also is one of the carrier sheets with the bottom half of the entire print. Since I only print 8 cans at a time, I divide the print before printing.
Once the cans are ready, I will assemble them to fit with the other pieces. When starting a piece, printing 100 cans to start will get me on the track of figuring out the way the piece will be assembled and what it will look like. With this piece, the way I thought it would be is nothing near the way it worked out. The original idea about constructing the cans came from the installation for Mack Web Solutions. (Click on the link to see the blog post)
When I arrived to install the piece, all the cans were in one piece and they evolved into being cut, stacked and wired together with glass beads separating the layers. For this Mariposa Grove piece, I cut the top layer of each square in 4 pieces. The bottom layer is a duplicate of the top layer, but in one piece. I crocheted 28 gauge stainless wire to put between the 2 layers. Then copper wire was used to wire the layers together and add it to the piece.
Design Intriguing Surfaces Ebook
Amate Bark Digital Print
Several projects have been going at one time and some of them were finished this past week. The subject of today’s post is a piece that started when I made bark paper (featured in the previous post) using the Amate process. The finished piece is composed of 3 layers: the bottom is a piece of black hardware cloth with a 1/4″ grid, above that is a piece of copper mesh that has been digitally printed, above that is a piece of the bark paper I printed with the same image on the copper mesh.
