Re: photocopier toner and ceramic imaging

Luis Nadeau (nadeaul@nbnet.nb.ca)
Wed, 12 Nov 1997 22:50:34 -0400

At 6:08 PM -0800 97/11/12, George Mackie wrote:
>Richard - thanks very much for your reply to my question about toner. This
>topic may seem inappropriate for this list but it has interesting

Don't worry: This is Alt enough to be appropriate for this list.

>implications for photoceramics and if others are interested I would be
>glad to discuss with them off-list, as I believe would Dennis Southwood
>who also replied. The technique is to turn off the copier after it has
>made the image on the paper but before the paper has gone through the
>heater to fuse the toner in place. You then open up the machine reach in
>and grab the paper (wear a dark shirt while executing this manoeuvre)
>turn the image face down onto a slab of clay and rub- the toner comes off
>on the clay.

All of it or most of it transfers to the clay?

>The image survives firing to
>cone 08 ( 945 C) and comes out looking like red iron oxide ( ochre) and no
>longer smears to the touch so you can glaze over it with a transparent
>glaze. Trouble is, its hard to get a strong image- tends to be
>wishy-washy, though the definition is very precise, more so than with
>dichromated colloid images in my experience.

I have many razor sharp photoceramics from dichromated colloids here, with
the advantage that they are full scale images.

>I got this out of Paul
>Scott's book Ceramics and Print, but Dennis told me Les Lawrence was doing
>it too and there may be others out there in cyberspace. What we need is a
>way of intensifying the image or getting more of the toner to leave the
>paper and go on to the clay and if oxides or salts of cobalt, copper,
>manganese etc could be incorporated in the toner, then of course the way
>would be open to colour-photocopier-ceramics. Its so diabolically simple
>in principle that I would like to make it work even if its a betrayal of
>all that alt-photo-process stands for - or is it ? George

First of all, instead of trying to possibly electrocute or fry yourself
getting to the paper half way through the process, couldn't you use some of
the transfer materials designed to put images on t-shirts? I suspect that
all of the pigment would transfer nicely.

My own photoceramic project is on the back burner at this moment but I
remember hearing, possibly on ClayArt, that some people were using
photocopiers and at least one person was trying to have three-color toners
made with ceramic mixtures. A search through the ClayArt archives may
reveal something.

Luis Nadeau
NADEAUL@NBNET.NB.CA
Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
http://www3.nbnet.nb.ca/nadeaul/