Experimenting w/ Golden Digital Grounds

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Golden Digital Grounds – Experiments

I will confess that I bought a sample pack of Golden’s Digital Grounds http://www.goldenpaints.com/mixmoremedia/digiground.php over a year ago and just never got around to experimenting with them. I bought the sample pack at Arizona Art Supply http://www.arizonaartsupply.com/ which contained 3 bottles of grounds and 2 jars of topcoats.

On a recent Friday night, in an exhausted state of being, I was entertaining myself by watching You Tube videos about printing on uncommon surfaces. Many of the videos I watched that night were by northern Arizona artist Kathyanne White http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oSPP0zUcv0&feature=related , whom I met this year at Art Unraveled. She uses a product called Inkaid http://www.inkaid1.com/ which I have never seen but seems to act like the Digital Grounds products in that it creates a surface on top of a surface so that it will hold the inks of an inket printer. She prints on lacepaper, fabric, etc.

Well, when she got to the part in one of her videos where she prints onto recycled aluminum cans, I was so inspired by then I pulled out my digital grounds and started playing. Here are my results:  Clck 'read more' for pics.....

Fabric

full sheet w/ various digital grnds

DG Matte (bottom 1/3)



top 1/3 - no digital grounds



The How

I took an 8.5 by 11” piece of muslin and on the bottom third of it, coated the fabric with Digital Grounds Matte. I also wrote with a sharpie which product I was using. The middle third of the fabric was coated with Digital Grounds Gloss. The upper third was left uncoated.

I printed the peacock image on the top and the middle parts of the fabric and then did an overall print of a photo of rocks I had taken over the entire page. The next morning, I rinsed it to see what would happen. Well, as you can see, the untreated top third did not hold the inket inks (and I did not expect it to). The middle and bottom treated sections held the ink perfectly. So it works. They do what they say they will do. I even kind of like the overprint of the rocks over the peacock.


Foil
Next, I coated a piece of crinkled aluminum foil. This also worked and I can see the need to play around with print settings to get the optimum print. It is kind of hard to tell what the image is but I love this effect on the aluminum. If you click on the photo and look at the close up, you can see where it printed on the hills and the valleys of the crinkled foil, very cool as far as I’m concerned.

Skins

I have wanted to make an acrylic skin ever since I first picked up Chris Cozen’s book ‘Altered Surfaces’. I love that book and refer to it often. Well, I took some Golden Soft Gel Gloss and smoothed it onto a plastic surface with a spatula. Actually I did two strips, then let them dry (sorry, no photo). Once dry, I taped them onto a piece of paper (8.5 x 11) , treated it with the digital grounds, let it dry and then ran it through the printer. Oh JOY! It was the same photo I used for the foil only this time, you can actually tell that it is a photo of a cactus. Well, I can, sorry if it isn't obvious. I was just happy that I was able to get a print.

 

Here is a link to my accomplice Quinn McDonald's blog with her post on our experiments together.   We were having toner issues but I love the effect on the foil.

More experiments to come.

Let me know what you think and if you have done any experiments with Digital Grounds.