Materials Conflict

In these pictures, you can really see the range of colors and color combinations in much of this book.  This is the first example of using a block printer to create text lines, as you can see on the right hand page below.

As you may have discovered, it takes a special kind of pen tip to be able to write on these surfaces.  A regular ball point or gel pen won't sustain an ink flow through a complete word.  It usually takes a pen like a Sharpie or Micron, with a fiber-based tip that floats the ink from the pen barrel to the porous material in the tip.  Even an old or aging fiber pen will often skip or fail to write on these acrylic surfaces. 

I also discovered the same challenges when using alcohol inks to create images.  I am not sure if it is the inks, the non-porous substrate that the alcohol inks are floating on....or both. Unlike the acrylic surfaces, a fibertip pen may NOT write on the alcohol/non-porous images at all.....this requires a different mixed-media approach OR a deliberate omission of text  space in the design!