Try It Out Tuesday : Spray Inks

I thought I would follow up last week's posts with a final post about using spray inks.  The image above shows a piece of Zeelon which has been sprayed with Brusho spray on ink.  The results are muted, but reasonably good.  The image below, however, shows another piece of Zeelon which has been sprayed with Brusho inks... quite a difference, huh?  The blues are identical, incidentally... just much brighter in the second piece.

What I did, was to prepare the cloth using a digital ground.  I figured that if it worked for digital ink, it would work for anything... and it does.  It keeps the colourant on the surface of the cloth, not allowing it to soak in.  The downside, if you consider it such, is that the reverse side has much less colour.  For me, though, it's enough to get this vibrancy, which is characteristic of Brusho.  I'm going to repeat the process of spraying with a setting agent, to make the colour stay where it is (though washing is not advisable). 

So...which is 'right', with or without the digital ground?  The answer is, there is no right.  If you want the muted effect, don't use the digital ground.  If you want vibrancy, use the ground.  Your cloth, your choice.  No right or wrong involved!

Try It Out Thursday...More Spray Colour

I thought I'd make a little experiment with the coloured cloth I made earlier this week, as we saw on Tuesday.http://spunbondsensations.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/try-it-out-tuesday-spray-colour.html  I have a spray called 'PrintGuard', which is intended as a waterproofing agent for inkjet prints, predominately.  It also 'enhances UV light resistance', so seemed promising to work with Brusho, a water soluble ink.  So, I tried spraying both sides of the cloth with it.  (Why both sides?  Well, because both sides show almost identical colour patterns, so I wanted to preserve them both.)  It passed the lick test (not quite as disgusting as it sounds... lick finger, see if colour comes away from cloth...); however, when I tried dabbing it with a piece of dampened kitchen roll, look what happened...

...whilst that isn't as big a loss of colour as it would have been without the spray, it's still significant.  You can see how the pigment has moved to the edges of the dampened section of the cloth; fine if you intended that, but not so good if a bit of damp has got into your image...  So, I sprayed both sides again, let it dry (it dries very quickly).  This time...

...as you can see, very little came off on the kitchen towel.  I think that a third spray would be enough to ensure that the odd bit of damp won't be a problem at all.  Interestingly, the white dot to the left of the image is not where I took the colour from, but rather was a part of the original patterning... the dimple just above it is where the colour was tested.

Worth having?  I think so.  I spray all my photographs with this stuff before I stitch them, to make sure that ink doesn't spread about the image on my hands.  I think I'll be doing the same with all water based substances from now on.  More experiments with sprays next week...