New printer adventures 🖨️🌈

Hellooo my lovely patrons! 🌈

I hope you're doing well!

Today I spent the day setting up and trying out my new printer, yay! :D I finally decided to buy one because it was something I really needed and hopefully it will make my life and work a bit easier haha

The one I got is the Epson Ecotank L805, for anyone curious and it's an A4 inkjet photo printer!

I mostly wanted it to make high quality prints of my work and also printing digital sketches that then I can transfer to a nice paper for traditional paintings!

The installation was easy and sooo smooth but the first printing attempts weren't really good -colors looked very opaque and dull- and that freaked me out a little because I thought something was not working right but then my friend Luz (who knows a lot about graphic design!!) explained to me a couple of things that helped me to understand how the different papers work.

So basically the less shiny your paper is, the less it will reflect bright colors. So if your work is highly saturated and colorful -like most of my digital illustrations are- chances are that it will end up looking a bit opaque and desaturated.

So if you want to preserve that saturation and brightness as much as possible, glossy photo paper will help with that.

I was kinda disappointed because I prefer papers with a matte finish and a little bit of texture and knowing that my art won't look 100% accurate on that kind of paper hurts a little lol but anyways, I did some tests with a couple of illustrations that have a more limited color palette and not too much shadows or highlights and the results were much better!

Sadly these photos don't represent very well how the colors actually look due to the ugly lighting, but these prints looked so much better than the Trix one, which has tons of highlights and saturated stuff that didn't translate well to paper.

And here're some more tests this time on a glossy paper with a canvas texture that I reallyy liked:

I need to keep experimenting a bit more here and find other possible options, but please let me know in the comments which paper of these -glossy or matte- do you like more, it would be really helpful 🥰

Lastly, having a printer means that I'll be finally able to use the freaking shrink film I bought years ago lol

I can't wait to cut these out, put them in the oven and experience the shrinking magic! ✨

My ultimate wish is being able open a physical postcard tier here on Patreon though and I know I've been saying that for a while now but it's something that will happen sooner or later because it would make me very veryy happy and hey! this is a big step into making it happen 💖

That's it! I'll keep you posted if I learn anything new about this haha 

Thanks so much for your support, love y'all and talk to you soon!

Gret