Printing artwork on Xuan paper 宣紙打印

Feeling the intangible 

One of the reasons why traditional artists    don't like digital painting is that digital artwork only exists in cyber space. They prefer something they can hold in their hands.  To address this, we can simply print the artwork on real pieces of paper.

Eastern Art Paper for printing

A decade ago, printing on  Eastern art paper was not easy because  of the paper thinness  causing jams.   Nowadays, it is much easily given those designed-for-printer-use Xuan paper packs in size  A4 or A3 or even in rolls available from taobao.com  (sorry, site in Chinese).   There are also Japanese paper designed for printing too (like Awagami). Looking at their website, it seems their papers are thicker than the art  paper we normally use for Eastern art, and thus pigments won't soaking into the paper all the way through like in real calligraphy works.

十年前用宣紙打印很麻煩的，因為紙太薄送紙容易弄皺。但現在淘寶有專門用來打印的宣紙，A4、A3，甚至長卷均有出售，雖然還是會皺，但廢品率已經改善很多。日本也有為打印而設的和紙，還未試，但感覺如果紙太厚則沒通透感，會像普通打在紙表面的 印刷品，而非像真的書法作品那麼墨滲透紙纖維的 藝術品。

A4-size Xuan paper for printing

Here we use Xuan paper packs (really cheap at  <2USD a pack of 100 sheets) bought  from Taobao.  

Printing with ink

For an authentic feel, we use Ink Jet printers instead of laser, because the paper absorbs the ink just like in real artworks. ​ If you use laser,  the pigment stays on top of the paper, giving an ordinary 'printout' feel. Here we use very low-cost printers with only 4 pigments. If you have more expensive printers using more pigments in different tones, the result should be finer.

See the process and more results:

Casual viewers probably won't notice those are prints.  This is especially true when  the work is   purely black like in normal Eastern calligraphy. 

---

For those who can't access Youtube, see if you can watch the same video hosted in this site:
如果您是大陸的，可能Youtube 看不到，所以我也試下在本站放上面那個視頻，看看您們看不看到，留言告訴我情況啊：