Still working.
It has been a trying few weeks since my last post. Things I thought were working seemingly stopped working at the decisive moment. I have moved out of my short term townhouse studio and back to my parents basement. I have printed and reprinted, cut paper and plastic, taped and masked and gessoed and sanded. But through all the trials, I have serendipitously stumbled like always onto better and more fitting solutions.
Starting out before christmas and new years I was in a rush to make an XL size roll of transfer film in order to utilize the print lab at my alma matter. After hours of sanding and coating a big-ol roll of acetate I arrived at Rowan’s print lab and received a crash course in printing on the Epson 9800 including the multiple head cleaning cycles. Much thanks to Mike Benson for being so helpful. Unfortunately in the process of sanding the acetate warped and some areas didn’t stay flat. Sadly the print heads scraped the surface a few times and my prints were totally useless. The good news that came out of this is that Mike Suggested i do a few prints on a transparency film they had in the print lab. After some examination i realized that it was the ideal substrate for my process. Later I found a 44″ by 100′ roll on ebay and clicked the buy now option.
In the mean time I busied myself with holidays, visiting, and moving out of my temporary studio. I’m now back in the basement at my parents house where I spent so much time as a kid painting the walls with Dinosaurs and playing G.I. Joe. Getting the studio together took some work, there was a lot to throw away and more to rearrange. After finishing those important steps I busied myself gessoing and sanding my panels and preparing some paper for transfers. Once the Roll of film arrived I started cutting down 13″ by 44″ sections in order to run them through my printer which has been operating fantastically for the last few days!
Three days ago I attempted Gel Medium transfer to one of my large panels, unfortunately I was unable to get a smooth enough coating on the panel to make the transfer turn out satisfactorily. A quick scrub and wash later I was re-gessoing the pannel to prep it for another try. Yesterday I retried with an acrylic medium x gelatin transfer process that worked out swimmingly!
I’ll be going back to Rowan later this week to get some more large prints and with any luck i’ll have the majority of my work completed for the show!
lots of stuff on the flickr to check out.
