Aerosol coating

[adl]

Looking for aerosol coating to make a paper or other media inkjet (pigment) printable.

Would you have any idea?

 

[WhiteDog]

There are lots of products you could use. Inkaid is one for inkjets, but there are ones as good or better at your local art store in the form of acrylic gessos, mylar film coatings, extenders, and so on normally intended for artists. This is a zone where using your imagination will give you something really different and beautiful. If you are in business do not give away your secrets as a lot of experimentation is necessary. Major chemistry vendors are Golden and Liquitex. It is not productive to coat fabric for stretching on frames IMO; use the prepared ones from several vendors. This comment does not apply to the fabric printing people, who have a whole set of other issues to deal with and who run very good groups on Yahoo.

There are some books with sections on paper coating. One very good one is "Digital Art Studio" by Karin Schminke et al., 2004, ISBN 0-8230-1342-1. Keep detailed notes of what you do or you will go crazy trying to get back to some effect you liked. If you get much into this I strongly advise that you procure one of those cute integrated airless spray outfits and do your own mixing as the aerosol cans will make you poor and crazy, and a lot of good products are not in aerosol. I have an industrial sprayer and compressor. You will need to do some mixing because from time to time you will dilute with air brush medium or light-body acrylic medium. If you are going to coat papers it will be necessary to learn how they are made and many other technical factors. Space for drying becomes an issue if you have a print run of more than 10, as these media are water-based and need to dry.

Papers are a whole massive topic on their own. Go to a really good art supply store with dozens of printmaking papers and just start trying them out. You will find this cheap to do as a 32" x 40" sheet of great paper is only about $3-5 and cuts into many sheets.

One of the laments of digital artists is that they find it hard to sell any finished image product. IMO the problem is partly that they overlook that the image creation is only part of art, and the public wants to buy truly custom one-off art pieces. GAllery owners know this and do not stock digital art. In other words, people want things that the artist has handled and physically struggled with. I stopped reading the yahoo group in digital art because nobody there wanted to wrestle with this reality, though they did not sell much doing it their way either. IMO, a poor oil painting will sell before good digital art because the striving of the artist is more evident in the oil medium, and the excellent digital print looks like something cut out of a magazine. In another way, the average digital artist seems to think of victory as "looking as good as an expensive magazine (photo)graphic" and the public feels that for that kind of art they can buy a magazine and get out the scissors.

In this direction the art-and-graphic printmakers have a great advantage over the computer imagers, if only when it comes to talking to gallery owners. Personally I am moving to graphic multimedia, not to find a market but because I like it and because my spouse is a trained fabric artist. It is interesting, and to her credit, that she found she needed the courses on graphic design and color theory to do this well. I believe that traditional photography will survive by being aligned in the future with art printmaking, at least for marketing.

Keep us posted.

PS I did not leave this editing screen to see if Nifty-Stuff has a paper preparation section, but IMO it would be very useful.