Combining digital and traditional art techniques: My first attempts

​When I first started experimenting with combining digital printing with other techniques, I was focused on using silk and other fabrics.

​My very first efforts were years ago, when I made a number of scarves, ties, and handbags using fabrics I painted and then overprinted on my inkjet printer. For example, I made scarves for everyone in the flute ensemble I was playing with at the time. They had a light reddish-brown background and borders of black with reddish-brown hand-drawn treble clefs. Printed over the background color in the center was a pattern I created in Photoshop of flute keys and musical notation. Here’s what they looked like:

One of the silk scarves I made for a flute ensemble I was playing with at the time. I painted the background color and borders using dyes (and gutta resist to draw the treble clefs in the borders). Then I printed the scarf with an image I created in Photoshop of flute keys and musical notation.

​To make those scarves, I started as I did for most of my silk scarves: by ironing the silk onto the shiny side of freezer paper. That stabilizes the fabric so that it doesn't slide around as you paint. Then I painted the fabric with dyes, creating a slightly mottled wash of the background color. Once the scarf was dry (and preferably allowed to sit at least overnight), I pulled it off the freezer paper (which is almost always easy to do and doesn't leave any residue on the fabric) and prepared it for steaming. (Steaming makes the dyes permanent and more vivid.) To do that, I laid the fabric out on blank newsprint, rolled it up loosely on the metal rod that fits into my steamer, making sure that no fabric was touching anything but newsprint, taped the roll closed, and put it in my steamer. After the steaming, I washed the excess dye out of the fabric and let it dry.

Reynolds Freezer Paper, the kind I usually use to stabilize my silk scarves for painting.

Then I was ready to print. I thought at first that the easiest way to get the scarf to feed through the printer would be just to iron it on another piece of freezer paper that I had cut down to 8.5 inches to fit in my printer. Unfortunately, that didn't work too well. Freezer paper generally comes on a roll, and the curl that remained in the paper even after ironing made it difficult to get it to feed into the printer properly. Plus, the edges of the scarf tended to come loose and get caught in the mechanism. Major printer jams!

Next, I tried taping multiple sheets of 8.5x11 copy paper together lengthwise until it was long enough for the scarf. Then I ironed the scarf and taped it to the paper on all edges. That was tedious, but it worked much better than the freezer paper.

​After a while, I got lucky and found a box of old-style continuous paper (the type old dot-matrix printers used) at a yard sale. That meant I didn’t have to tape the sheets together anymore; I just had to tape the scarf to the paper. I did have to tear off the pin-feed edges, though, because with them on the paper was too wide for the printer.

Old-fashioned dot matrix continuous paper, which I used as a base to print scarves with an inkjet printer.

I used this method to create quite a few scarves and ties, plus fabric that I then sewed into handbags, totes, and other items. But it was cumbersome, and even with the continuous paper and careful taping, I still had frequent printer jams and print quality problems. And I used up a lot of ink because of those problems and because I had to clean the print heads after every problem. The size limitation was an annoyance, too -- nothing could be more than 8.5 inches wide. 

For the decorative items I was making at the time, the biggest drawback to the method, though, was that the inks in a standard inkjet printer aren't waterproof. That mean I could make only items that would be dry-cleaned or never cleaned. I could solve that problem, and the size-limitation problem, by buying a specialized wide-format printer that uses inks or dyes made to be permanent on fabric. But those printers are really expensive -- way out of my budget. I'd never be able to charge enough for a scarf, tea towel, or handbag to justify that expense.

So I put those experiments aside for years, until those art ideas I'd been pushing to the back of my brain became too insistent to be ignored anymore. One day, it occurred to me that a painting doesn't have to be waterproof, so the ink problem is not a problem. And I could work around the size limitation by collaging or tiling pieces together. Hmmm...

Next time, I'll talk about my first attempt at an art piece using both digital and traditional techniques. Thanks for stopping by!