The Limits of Practicality

I tinkered around over the weekend with some of those papers I printed recently via Gelli plate or direct to paper.

I always photograph my paper prints, as I did with surface designed fabric, for my archive as well as to post online.  I admit to having an older digital camera, which means I always need to do some amount of Photoshopping to get the images to look like (or slightly better than) the original printed paper.

My computer and my printer have never been color calibrated, and that's not something I ever intend to do.  Which is to say that the printed digital image never looks just like the original ~ it always looks tweaked, because it is.  And often that's just fine, but I'm less happy with that result in this case.

The first image here is collage on a digitized image of printed paper.  Note: I don't have a religious bone in my body ~ I just like these magazine images together.

I also fooled around with manipulating a digital image of one of the printed papers, tweaking different settings in Photoshop in an effort to digitally recreate the original.  Too much effort, too many sheets of photo paper, too much ink use later, and I wasn't charmed by the result here either.

Finally I just put sheets of printed paper right on my scanner bed and color copied them.  The second and third collages are on color copies of original printed paper.  This was/is a perfect solution for me, the color is right on, the visual texture of the original is all there.  So this is what I'll do in future when I don't want to use up the original paper.  Also, I'll likely go back to using smaller sheets of blank paper to print on, because I'm limited to my letter-sized scanner bed.  No problem.