Transparency Discrepancy

Today’s timed sketch was done using only the Blackwing 602 pencil and my shammy cloth. I think I prefer mixing the types of graphite.

Now onto the main event – experimenting with the transparencies.

Yesterday I printed my drawing onto tissue paper, and it was very fragile, but gave a promising result, even on a very textured background. Today I tried out a brand new paper supply I have had my eye on for a while, and finally caved the other day and acquired two rolls. Hygiene paper for treatment tables.

I have been following Jackie Bernardi‘s adventures with medical exam paper (the term to search in North America), gel printing and mixed media. The woman is a genius. I have fannied about with matt medium and tissue paper translucent collage fodder for a few years, and she has come up with a technique using gloss medium and water, and the aforementioned cheap as chips medical exam paper.

Her technique will work on several different types of paper, and she has videos on her channel if you are interested. I tried the plain tissue paper, and today I tried the hygiene roll that arrived yesterday.

My rolls are 2-ply, which I discovered after I printed the first image. For both attempts I split the plies, and it printed just fine. I tried fixing my hygiene roll sheet to the heavier carrier paper with blue masking tape, and it went through my printer just fine.

The right side image is the first attempt, where my image was larger, and I was pretty happy with how that turned out.

The image on the left is in a smaller journal, and I printed off two smaller versions of my drawing on the same sheet. They printed fine, but when I sprayed the first one with water, the ink ran and changed colour. I applied it to the page anyway, but it was very faint, so I carefully applied the second image on top. It works for the spread, and it’s an experiment, so it’s not a disaster, but I was stumped as to why I got such a different reaction.

Then I remembered that when I was setting up the print in the app for the second printing, I did some fiddling with the black setting that I hadn’t done the first time. Presumably that affected which ink the printer used, and that affected the permanence. Fascinating.

I’ve now got a bunch of experiments to try out, and 80 metres of paper roll to play with. Yay.

Til the morn,

Suzanne

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