Re: photocopier toner and ceramic imaging

George Mackie (mackie@uvic.ca)
Sun, 16 Nov 1997 11:26:52 -0800 (PST)

On Wed, 12 Nov 1997, Luis Nadeau wrote:

> At 6:08 PM -0800 97/11/12, George Mackie wrote:
> > 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?
>
Luis - if the clay is still damp ( throwing consistency) the toner
adheres to it pretty well - probably 80% of it comes off. With dry
greenware or bisque ware not enough comes off. If you dampen it, more
comes off, but even better, if you go over the surface with a glue stick
(e.g. UHU) and apply a thin even coat, enough toner will adhere to give
an image almost as good as the one you get on damp unfired clay.

> > 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 hope to get better gum pictures with practice but if the clay surface is
given a 'primer' coat of fixed gum before the image-forming coat is
applied (as recommended to reduce background staining) the image is
separated from the surface to which it will eventually adhere by the
thickness of the primer coat. As the latter burns off, the image settles
onto the surface but some blurring occurs in the process, or does when I
do it. Thats one reason why I went the gum resist route- the image forming
ingredients are then directly applied to the clay surface. However even
here, the images dont seem as sharp as with transfer xerographs.

Thanks to you and several others who had interesting comments on this
thread.

George