After 7 days of ladder hopping and duct taping I've gotten a reasonable combination of fans and ducts that no longer resembles a scene from the movie Brazil. Grainger has an amazing selection of fans and switches that came in handy. Most of the ducts came from Home Depot. Now I have a small variable speed fan at the exhaust vent of the InfraRed dryer and a suspended 8" vertical exhast fan above the flash unit. This is assisted by a remote vertical exhaust dryer booster that turns on automatically with a pressure sensitive switch.
I also picked up a couple of window fans, but I am worried that it may interfere with the venting. Now I can experiment with the discharge inks in a more reasonable way. I've always associated air ventilation with air conditioning and it's never been within my price range, so from a working environment standpoint I feel like I've been freed from the restraints of working with some chemicals. At the very least it will make the shop more bearable when toasting plastisol like burning bread for multi-colored prints. If this works I'll always install an overhead vent from here on out like an overhead vent on a stove, why not? I'm never going back.
Update on Phot-Fresco frames: I covered several test Photfrescos with clear exteriors. The idea is to encase them for waterproofing and to protect from the degradation that the inks suffer when exposed to direct sunlight. I realized some of the similarities to t-shirt printing to ink jet printing on paper when researching the inks versus dyes article listed in a previous post. This makes me aware of the archival nature of all products, prints especially. One of my arguments for the Phot-Frescoes is that they are like having a photograph in stone. However, my test have shown that in direct sunlight the inks from the inkjet printers that I use breakdown quickly on the top surface of the plaster and turn to white dust. Not so good for a Rock Photograph.
I've tried several sealing methods like brushing on acrylic clear varnish, but it dissolved the prints and smeared the designs. I used spray paint acrylic varnish, but this required too many coats as the spray was absorbed into the plaster like a bisque clay is absorbed into the sides of a mold. Yesterday I tried a clear epoxy, more expensive, on one framed fresco and a polyester resin, less expensive, on another. I poured them in the parking lots of the respective stores where I purchased the materials and let them dry as I drove over the Richmond Bridge to my laboratory. I thought this was good for spreading, ventialating and working out air bubbles in the material. The polyester resin butterfly fresco was yellowed and it dulled the colors of the image. The Epoxy dried clear and increased the vibrancy of the colors.
The Epoxy coating was superior for the opacity of the top coat, but it also may have changed the image, making it blurry and glossy. The cleark at the store described this as making the image look wet if it isn't sealed before the epoxy is poured. At a marine store I am investigating a penetrating epoxy which sounds good and I am familiar with this stuff from working on boats. Basically it follows into the pours of wood and seals off the rot and is used to seal a spot before filling and sealing the opening.
My goal is to understand the inks that are being fixed with these chemicals is at issue with the Frescos, as well as, with the t-shirts. These last frescos I fixed were made with the cotton dyes that I have been using and the Seaweed paste I have been experimenting with. As the residue dried on the leftover material it turned back into a sea weed like film. This means that the pigments from t-shirt dyes can simply be taken over by the longterm breaking down of the plaster below and simply overwhelm the pignments and turn them to white just like the sun can do as it breaks down the pigments. Possibly a penetrating epoxy may substitute enough of the plaster to create an internal barrier to this decay.
Today I am going to make two new phot-frescos with wooden screen printing frames as the base with the images of a Loch Ness Monster passing under the Golden Gate Bridge. Here is the t-shirt version of this modified postcard image of the bridge. I don't want to go into details, but there is indeed at least one Sea Monster that lives in the cavernouse waters below the inlet to San Francisco and on foggy days it has been spotted following boats that have veered off course.
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