So a couple years back I figured out a neat way to have a sign company print my sketch straight to primed masonite. This made setting up a painting way easier than projecting my sketch to the board, mounting a sketch, or other tedious methods. This worked extremely well. The printed image, which was meant for store signage was lower resolution, but it was great for an underpainting. I told others about it, and soon people were sending in art and the company was sending out printed panels all over the US. <\/p>\n
Then I started having doubts. We have all heard horror stories of paintings peeling off of canvases because of bad gesso. So I looked into the media that was being printing on these boards. It was UV reactive and weather sealed. Seemed ok, but of course nothing stated it as archival. Who gets a sign made for their shop and asks if it is archival. We had a couple of signs we made for the Ren Fest and that’s what made me start to worry even more. The first year the signs looked great. I had added some acrylic flourishes to them and coated them with Spar Urethane. The second year they started to look cloudy. I looked up the sign printing information again, and saw that a benefit of the UV treated inks is that it is hard to stain. Nervousness started to sink in.<\/p>\n
By the third year both signs were peeling and unrepairable. So I though, what is going to happen to our paintings over the next 10 years? Look at what happened to Davinci’s Last Supper.<\/a> So I immediately started looking for a more archival way to basically do the same thing. <\/p>\n I had started looking at the fine art papers for our Epson printer. I ordered in some of the Epson Watercolor paper, and planned on using it on my next project. At Dragoncon, I spoke with Todd Lockwood, telling him my ideas, and he told me that is how he did the cover for his first book, The Summer Dragon<\/a>. In fact he pointed me to this great video of him mounting the paper, which was very helpful.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nThe solution<\/h3>\n