experimenting with digital ground and acrylic skins

In and around a disastrous attempt at a week away, I've been doing some experimentation with digital grounds (from Golden) which led to some trials of making acrylic skins.  I was feeling reluctant to blog about it all because I don't really have a finished piece to show off but then I realized there's real value in sharing the interim work.  That's where my learning happens, after all. 

The piece above, Grounded (fuchsia) is a purely digital piece.  I was taking photos of the purple background piece that exists in fabric and didn't have the light set up correctly.  One of the photos came out really pink rather than purple.  And I liked it.  So I fiddled with the colors in Photoshop for a bit and ended up with this piece.  This led to wanting to put it on one of the wooden panels I use for mounting/framing my work but the question was how?  And that led to the digital ground experiments.

First I tried the porous surface ground on various papers:  cardstock, tissue paper, and regular inkjet paper.  Why bother with the ground at all, you ask?  Well, the ground fixes the ink so it won't bleed, at least this particular ground so I don't have to use any extremely stinky fixative spray on it.  And since I was already having some serious allergy issues with chemicals this week, that seemed the way to go.  Of the 3 papers, the cardstock worked best.  Tissue paper had a tendency to crinkle up and distort and the cardstock curled less than the regular paper.  The cardstock is easy to adhere to the wood panel with a layer of gel medium and then fairly easy to trim to fit with an exacto knife or rotary cutter.  But there's that layer of paper in there and it forces me to use an image that goes all the way to the edges.  What would work as well but not have that layer of white paper?

Acrylic skins seemed an obvious answer.  I got introduced to them in my paint pouring class and Golden has a very nice video about using their digital grounds on varied media, including the skins.  They also have a nice video about making skins.  So I started trying this idea out.

First, I needed to make skins.  Maybe it's my quilter's background, but I immediately wanted to be sure what size of skin I was making.  That led to me creating a skin template on the maximum size paper for my wide bed printer.  (13" x 19" for the curious.)  Since acrylic skins are made on a non-stick surface which can be clear or mostly translucent, this will let me size them while making them.

So first I tried matte medium brushed on my 2 different Teflon pressing sheets.  They're what I use when fusing fabric and I have several extras as I used to have multiple surfaces covered with them.  I brushed the medium in one direction first, let it dry, then did the perpendicular direction.  Both of those were a good solid skin but a bit thin and I had problems getting the edge to start peeling up.  This is when I went to the Golden videos for info on making skins.

I switched to gloss medium since it dries clear and that is one of the things I was looking for.  And I poured a heavier amount of medium onto the Teflon sheets and spread it with a palette knife.  Unfortunately, the medium had a tendency to bead up and leave holes in the skin with the first layer.   So I made a mental note to try a gel medium next and moved on to trying a paint/gloss medium mixture on parchment paper.  This worked fairly well altho the resulting skin was streaky in the color because I didn't blend the paint into the medium before spreading it. 

And that's where I am now.  With some ideas of things to try and at least 2 workable approaches for what I want to do.  I have several more experiments on my list for February and I'll undoubtedly share them here.