William Oldacre Photography

Tag: ink

  • Epic Fial – Rinse, Repeat

    Epic Fial – Rinse, Repeat

    I poured the next layer of resin and damn if it didn’t go REALLY well – especially after all my anxious planning and scheming. I switched my measuring and second stage mixing gear to glass away from plastic after I found during extensive vacuum testing – which almost melted my pump – that the plastic was actually porous and introducing new air into the resin mix – who woulda thunk that?!!

    Mould Building #11
    Mould Building #12

    The pour had virtually no air bubbles and I poured it oh so delicately to not introduce new bubbles – which actually went very well. The roll out of the first ink transfer layer went very well also with no new air introduced and minimal overflow of resin.

    I felt really good that night – a huge sigh of relief that I was finally successfully underway. Riding that high I took a look at the piece the next morning to further revel in that feeling of success. And this is what I saw…

    Mould Building #13

    millions of teeny tiny bubbles all over the place where exactly none had been the night before. What the hell! For two days I hummed and hawed over this with friends and associates, also examining it carefully with a loupe trying to understand what had happened.

    Two more days later those teeny tiny bubbles had become this…

    Mould Building #14
    Mould Building #15
    Mould Building #16

    Yep, that’s the end of that. You can see the teeny tiny bubbles are still there but these new pancakes have developed underneath at the surface of the backlit film. I’m still not entirely sure what reaction is going on here but HOPEFULLY it’s the backlit film material and NOT the ink. I’m about to do another pour over top of the first ink transfer layer – which by the way went pretty well also – surprise surprise. And guess what, the mould released perfectly too leaving an almost perfect block of resin – wow, so much success only to be crushed by this unknown, unforeseen problem. Depending on if new pancakes emerge after this next test pour or not should tell me if the ink is reacting with the resin or not. Oh, and then one side of the mould broke off – gotta re-glue that too. What next?!!

    Needless to say … I am very upset – and anxious about this next test. If pancakes appear, that’s it for using this urethane resin and back to testing other materials – resin or otherwise. Gah, so close!

  • Volumetric Prints

    Volumetric Prints

    Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, mauve, blue, turquoise, muted, stripes, streaks, lines, pattern
    Private Discussion In Mauve, 2014 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

    A friend recently showed me a kickstarter project that has some interesting similarities to how I was considering printing these images. Although they go about it by stacking together a series of clear plates with printing on them – whereas I was considering building up layers of ink on clear polyester resin. But I think the result is fairly similar and very cool. They call it volumetric printing and the prints are a kind of three dimensional hologram of objects encased in a solid clear cube. Take a look here for a visual and at the kickstarter here for a full description.

    These objects this brother and sister team are making will be small – up to 4″x6″x3″ whereas I’m contemplating something much larger – huge in fact – perhaps 48″x72″x3″. It’s still a massive experiment for me and will require a separate clean, dust free space to try it out in. One with ventilation or far removed from living breathing things as the polyester resin emits some incredibly poisonous volatile organic compounds – VOCs for the rest of us – the stuff that makes you high but kills brain cells at a prodigious rate and eventually gives you cancer and all kinds of other ills like skin ulcers and such. Nice stuff.

    This is assuming I’m able to transfer the ink to the resin as I’ve seen done in a youtube video – very cool idea by the way – and assuming I’m able to break the images into layers in a way that speaks to their internal shape and movement.

    There’s also a serious technical problem to consider and somehow work around. Normally I would want to break an image into layers with darkest objects on the back layer and lightest objects on the top layer… but I can’t do that. In fact I have to do the exact opposite. And this is simply because printing inks are additive not subtractive – meaning the more ink I print in an image the darker the image gets – and it’s impossible for me to print white. There are printers with a white ink channel but mine isn’t one of them. So white is assumed – as in supplied by the white base of the paper. All this means is lighter objects have less ink and require more light to transmit from the back of the print to the front. Darker objects are a build up of multiple layers of ink and lighter objects are made up of layers with ink holes topped by a very light ink layer.

    But seeing Shawn and Christina’s completed volumetric objects I’m thinking this problem is not such a big deal after all.

    First things first – I need to complete the Light Signatures images. Which I’m aggressively doing now – aiming for the end of June. Wish me luck.

  • Inked Photo On Paper

    Inked Photo On Paper

    1994
    Chromogenic Print, Ink Illustration