Over the past few months, I’ve started working with a new printing and mounting process that I’m getting pretty excited about!
I’m printing my photographs on film and laminating them onto dibond, a composite material made of thin aluminium sheets on the outside, with a plastic core on the inside. It’s lightweight, rigid and durable, and the panels can be hung on the wall with or without a decorative frame.
Mounting prints onto dibond isn’t really new, but what’s exciting me is printing on clear films and laminating those to dibond with lovely surfaces, such as brushed aluminium. This allows the surface of the board to show through the films. The combination of layering the printed images on the dibond sheet creates some very interesting opportunities.
I print the clear film using my Epson large format printers, which provides very wide colour gamut along with archival permanence. Then I laminate the prints to the dibond board.
Shown here is one recent example, titled Fusión.
First, I printed my photograph in reverse on the clear film. This allows me to flip the film over so the printed image ends up on the back side, the film thickness creating a protective layer. I mounted the print film to the brushed aluminium dibond using optically clear laminating adhesive film.
As you can see, the clear film is very glossy. So I made another variation of the work by applying a matte laminate afterward (see the last image below). I like both looks—it just depends on the specific image, and the planned installation.
Next, I will be working on layering multiple printed images on separate films to create a composite 3D effect.
I’m really loving this new process, and it opens up a lot of new possibilities. In the past, I have also had metal prints made by directly printing onto the brushed dibond… but this requires a very large, flatbed printer. And the UV-cured solvent inks on flatbed printers provide nowhere near the quality I can get from my Epson pigment-based printers. The best thing is that I can produce these entirely in-house!
Much more to come on this … stay tuned.
