I thought I’d share a couple of strange visual things which I experienced recently.
I spent the day printing the final colours on my new landscape print. The final colour is a slightly darker version of the previous colour. It’s quite subtle but creates a nice effect.
Now ink often dries a little darker than it looks ‘in the pot’. Even though I’m well aware of this I was still taken by surprise when the freshly printed ink matched almost exactly with the layer underneath — I printed a layer, lifted the screen, and did a double take as it looked like I hadn’t printed anything at all.
As I realised what had happened, I simply waited a few moments and as the ink dried, it grew s l o w l y darker like it was magically appearing right before my eyes. Quite an interesting and strange visual occurance!
The second instance of my eyes playing tricks on me happened when I got home.
On the wall of my studio room I have a framed copy of the 2019 Green Man festival poster. It’s a 3 colour print and one of my favourites of the collaborative ones we’ve designed.
As I glanced up at the wall my eye was suddenly drawn to the bottom right of the poster, where there are some flowers on a textured background.
It was completely popping out in 3D, like I was wearing 3D glasses!
The effect was very strong and incredibly convincing. I actually reached out to touch the perspex of the frame. What the hell?!
This was incredibly strange and I cannot over emphasise just how convincing the effect was. I think a weird combination of the evening light and my contact lenses caused the background texture to behave like an autostereogram. When I looked at it later (wearing my regular spectacles) the effect was no longer apparent and, thankfully, the poster was behaving itself normally.
I wonder if any other printers have experienced similar strange visual effects?
Thanks for reading!
