What are the bare necessities of a piece of wall art? Typically a print picture or a painting on canvas or wood, placed in a frame for ornate and hanging purposes. I've been working with raw canvas the last few weeks making patches with prints on them and have framed a few of them. Instead of stretching the canvas I have been printing it flat and then coating the material with shellac and posting them on the wall. The shellac stiffens the canvas and gives it a vintage or aged look.
As usual, problems arise from the coatings of amber shellac as I have started to mount the canvas on wood and into plaster frames for hanging. The water based inks I have been using cause some curling of the canvas and make it difficult to bond with a flat exterior frame without pressing the canvas under a heavy object for some period of time after the shellac dries. I tested plastisol prints and coated it with
epoxy only to have the coating puddle and seep into the canvas causing a darkened print.
Tonight I took a variety of canvas prints and applied an interior clear shellac. My idea is that the clear shellac will not cause as much of a darkening and may provide enough of a coating on top of the canvas to keep the epoxy from seeping in as much and therefore result in a lighter print. The biggest issue now is if the shellac will respond like the epoxy and cause a puddle effect.
I took a sheet of patches that were printed with a plastisol ink, the same ink I use to print t-shirt designs for production. I expected the shellac to create rings on the plastisol like printing on a waxy surface, but it did not appear to do so on the first coat. Also the print appears to be lighter than if I used the amber colored shellac. I ran out of clear shellac before I could do a second coat, but will check the results tomorrow and see if the material remained flat, clear and had a consistent top surface before I apply a layer of epoxy.
