Florabunda Printouts

The other day, my hubby tried unsuccessfully to print out my pdfs of the Florabunda drawings I did recently, and my friend Lucy offered to print them for me – they have to be done on a laser printer whose ink will not run if you wet it. She dropped them off this afternoon and the results are absolutely great – I gave her two different sorts of card to experiment with, and the best results were definitely from the smooth card (Oce Top Colour Satinated printer card). The lines came out lovely and fine, unlike the somewhat smudgy dark lines on the rougher, more absorbent card (regular inkjet printer card). The Top Colour card is the one I like to use for Zentangle drawing as it has a lovely smooth surface that the pens flow over nicely, and it seems to take colour well, at least from the Inktense pencils – I am going to have to experiment with other media, which is one reason why I wanted several copies of each design. If this is successful, I shall ask Lucy to print out some more for me.

My hubby’s laser printer is not working very well and may be on the way out – he’s had it for quite a number of years now, and maybe the time has come to invest in one myself. He doesn’t use it much since he retired and I can always print out anything he needs done on a laser printer. Not that I am particularly keen to shell out the cash for another printer just now…

Anyway, here are examples of the sheets she did for me.

If you look carefully you can see some small black lines in the margins of each sheet. These are part of the grid templates I have created on my desktop publisher in various sizes for different purposes, and indicate where the card should be cut. The card with the larger motifs on it has four 2 1/2 inch squares down the right hand side, which I shall cut and do further alphabet letters on. The borders were just arranged as many as I could get onto an A4 sheet, without creating a grid template for them – they were just drawn on offcut strips and I’m not so fussy about them being an exact size, but for the other pieces it’s good to have an accurate measurement for matting and layering purposes when card making.

Then came the big surprise! Lucy persuaded me to look again at the stack of copies, and at the bottom were two sheets that she had foiled!! I was stunned at how absolutely gorgeous they were, and could scarcely believe that I had drawn these – with this treatment, they looked like professionally printed designs!! On the cutting machines forum recently we’d had a discussion about different methods of foiling, and Lucy, and several of the other members, have foiling machines that they use in conjunction with their laser printers – you need a laser printer because the toner will re-melt in the foiling machine and fuse the foil onto the card just where the black toner is, and nowhere else. The detail is astonishing. (Oh dear… not only do I now want a laser printer, but also a foiling machine!!!)

As usual, shiny and reflective surfaces are notoriously difficult to photograph, but here goes with my best effort. The top image on the right-hand sheet is foiled in purple but it isn’t catching the light.

I hope this gives an indication of what fabulous results you can get from foiling! Lucy said that she did the whole sheet of the letter B, laying strips of different coloured foil for each row, so that I could experiment with adding inks and other forms of colour – she thinks that the foil should stay put and not lift up if it gets wet. The foil should also act as a resist to any water-based media. It will be interesting to experiment. I shall probably leave the two larger ones as they are, and make cards from them.

Not having felt too well over the past few days, I have made no further progress with drawing and colouring.