Hello Everyone! Today I am playing around with InkAid to try to see if I can print on paper that has been coated with Tim Holtz Distress Mediums by Ranger- the Crazing Collage Medium and Grit Paste.
Lately I have been having trouble with my transfers from DASS (Digital Art Studio Seminar) and I am not sure whether it is because my mixture has gone bad, I am using the wrong mixture or it just doesn’t work all that well on the Distress mediums, although I was also experiencing trouble with some of the Golden mediums I also tried.
So I decided to go another route. InkAid allows you to paint it on and inkjet print on materials that you ordinarily wouldn’t be able to. So I am painting Distress Crazing Medium and Distress Grit paste onto Yupo paper. The Yupo paper is a knockoff by SAA and is very thin- thinner than the original Yupo that I normally use for making die cuts with my digital cutting machine. So although I could use it for masks and stencils, I decided to sacrifice some of it for this experiment.
I wanted to try Yupo paper, because if you do this on regular cardstock, the medium is very wet and so it will buckle. If you don’t have Yupo paper and you don’t feel like using or buying it, then you can spray the back of the paper with water and that will help it not buckle as much. You can also wait until the mediums are dry and then place some heavy books on top of the papers to try to smooth them enough to go through the printer.
So for the first step, I just painted the crazing and grit pastes onto the Yupo paper. It will have brushstrokes when it’s dry along with the texture from the mediums.
When it dried I painted on 2 coats of InkAid. I will tell you, it is kind of hard to mix. So generally what I try to do is leave it on its side so the white stuff collects along the side and then it is easier to mix. I just use a long stick to go in and stir it. And if I leave it on its side, there’s more of the product from the bottom that stays in suspension and it’s just easier to mix again. I paint lengthwise and then I come back and go crosswise and then let it dry. And I do that process twice letting it dry in between.
I then chose a Photoshop document that I had created to play around with different techniques and this was the file I would print from onto the InkAid coated textured paper.
Note that in the video and in this post, I am showing/explaining how to work with Photoshop and the Epson 3880 printer. My settings are all for that particular printer and if you have a different printer, then you may or may not have the same settings. You should have settings for the paper sizes, but you might not have a choice for different profile settings within the Printer settings to match your paper. The printer and possibly the paper you are using might come with an ICC color profile and those can be used to set up your document as I describe below….
In the video, I show you how I set up my Photoshop file. I have found that setting the color profile of the Photoshop file to match the paper that I am going to print on to be the best setup for new files. These paper profiles, as I mentioned earlier, either come with the printer or some paper companies put out the ICC color profiles themselves. For color matching purposes it is always best to utilize these specific profiles, or one that comes the closest. There are also websites that can create profiles for you if you have a specific need for one. Most folks will recommend using the profiles within Photoshop and have Photoshop Manages Colors when you go to print, but I have found that doesn’t work as well for me. I use Printer Manages Color instead as I show in the video and describe below.
The first time I use a particular printer and paper combination, when I go to create the document for my printout, I create a New Document setting with the size (circled in Red) and profile of the paper or closest profile to it (circled in Turquoise) especially if I am going to be using that paper a lot. In the video I show how I set up a New Document setting for 9×12 inches and the Epson Photo Glossy color profile that was installed with my printer.
NOTE: In the video I use 9×12 inches because that is the size of the Yupo paper that I usually use, but in reality the SAA Yupo paper is actually A4 size which is closer to 8.5×11. So I should have chosen the A4 size for the paper size.
I type in a name (InkAid 9×12) for the setting and choose the Save icon (shown by a green arrow in the image below). The next time I go to create a new document for that same paper, I can choose the saved setting and not have to set the paper size and color profile again.
My original document was not set up for the paper setting I wanted to use, so after creating the new document setting with the correct size and profile, I copied the images from the old file into the new one.
When I am ready to print, I choose Printer Manages Color, pick the printer I want to print to, and then hit the Print Settings button to set the preferences for my printer and make sure all the settings match the paper I am using. In this case Photo glossy is the Media Type I pick, and I set the Paper Settings Size to 9×12 (again this should have been A4). I had already set up a User defined Size setting for 9×12 because I use it a lot.
You can also save these print settings as a whole by clicking the Save/Def button next to the Select Setting dropdown and giving it a name. The next time you are going to print on the same paper again you can just choose the saved setting from that Select Setting dropdown.
Finally I print the document which had 4 card fronts that I was playing around with in Photoshop. You can see the texture of the Distress crazing and grit pastes coming through the images.
I loved the way the images printed. This seemed to be a lot easier than trying to do transfers when you have a specific image that you want as designed in Photoshop, only with texture.
Transfers are always tricky- you hold your breath, you cross your fingers, you click your heels three times, pray to the art gods and you still never know if they’re going to come out. Sometimes it can be fun, and serendipitous but a lot of times it can be very frustrating. So for ease of use, I would say this is probably the way I’m going to go for textured images.
Enjoy!
