While nothing can replace the tactile feel of laying down paint, I still really enjoy the control offered by painting in a digital environment like Procreate. I would guess that probably a good 20% of my work, or more, is digital. Once a piece is finished, it more or less is stored away in a digital folder, and not thought of much after that.
While I have had some success with digital prints, as I alluded to in a previous post, I am always looking for new ways to do things. One problem I'll probably never solve is having tons of spare materials clogging up my studio. Recently I've been trying to marry the problems of what to do with digital prints, and what to do with spare and leftover material.
The new solution I've come up with checks a lot of boxes. I've been experimenting with using my basic HP inkjet printer to make digital prints on antique pages from books, magazines and newspapers. As a result, I was left with a bunch of test pages that I printed out, including the one you will see in the photos here.
The piece I am showing you today is made by printing out a digital painting on to a 6x9 page from a 1905 Masters in Art magazine using a very basic HP printer. Once I had the print, I went into the studio and found some leftover wood, which I painted black. I used acrylic gel medium to attach the art onto the backer board. Once that dried, I distressed it with sandpaper, then attached the frame and distressed that, and last used 2 coats of matte spray enamel, which really made the colors and distressing pop on the piece, more so than what I was expecting.
In creating this piece, I was able to use up a test print of a digital painting, an old page from a 1905 magazine, and a bunch of scrap wood I took from a pile in my studio. I'm really excited with the results, and have already started making more work in this same vein. Stay tuned to see more coming soon.