An Early Start

Sunday, July 1, 2007




Although today is the official first day of the month I got a bit of a head start on my July page. This month's page has already taught me a few lessons as I try out new surfaces for printing out my photos.

After I had chosen my photos and layout for the month I thought about what feel I wanted them to have. The large round stone gate led me to feel that I wanted to try using a more textured surface to print on.

In my collage work I have used white tissue paper to add texture to pieces. I decided to take some light weight inexpensive cotton fabric and apply white tissue paper to it with a 50/50 mix of white glue and water. I tore the tissue up into smaller pieces and crinkled them up and then opened them up and glued them down, overlapping the pieces and making sure that some of the wrinkles stayed in. The biggest challenge is not to play with it too much, the tissue paper is fragile when wet. Once this was dry I ironed it to make sure it was fairly flat to go easily though the printer. I then cut the tissue fabric into 8 1/2" x 11" pieces.

The printing taught me some lessons as well. Using higher quality printing isn't always the best option when printing onto unusual surfaces. I had to do a second printing on the background photos, although it was dramatic with the higher quality printing it was also a bit over saturated and I lost some of the details.

I printed all of the layers onto the tissue fabric and then adhered the background and gate images to EZ-Felt. I wanted the stability for the background and I wanted the added bit of dimension for the gate. I cut out around the gate so that I could layer it over the background image. The ink from the printer is not water proof so I did spray a light coat of poly-acrylic to it so that I wouldn't get ink on my fingers when I worked on it.



Although I had printed the flowers onto the tissue fabric as well, I didn't get the feel I wanted from them. They are closer to the viewer and the tissue fabric lends itself better to softer focus and softer whiter. I didn't like this and decided to print them out on the June Tailor Quick Fuse that I used for my June page. The difference was marked and I was quite happy with the new results. I cut them out and fused them onto the page. Oh, now to start the beading...