Digital Grounds: Putting it to the Test

Testing! 123! Testing! Yes, I’ve been playing around with diligently doing some testing using the new Golden Products Digital Grounds products.

I’ve seen a few mentions on various blogs about how using Digital Ground produces a superior inkjet print however there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of comparison testing, so saying that it produces a good image without actually comparing it to anything doesn’t really say much at all.

So let’s put this stuff to the test and see how it *really* performs. Today begins a series of posts detailing some tests on various fabrics (and other stuff), using Golden Products Digital Grounds. This was a fun experiment with some surprising results so if you’re into printing images on fabric and other fabric-like stuff, or if you’re maybe thinking about going there, stick around for the next few weeks to see the results.

If you don’t know what Digital Grounds are, here is the description as detailed on the Golden Products Website:

Digital Grounds Sample Set

GOLDEN Digital Grounds are ink-receptive coatings intended for use with ink-jet printers. They allow the artist to coat and subsequently print over a large variety of substrates including paper, canvas, metal and acrylic paints, using ordinary computer printers and inks.

Digital Grounds comes in three different types:

Digital Ground White (Matte): a semi-opaque white ground suitable for printing onto a large variety of porous and non-porous surfaces. The smooth and absorbent surface allows printing inks to dry rapidly, making it an ideal starting product for artists exploring digital printing.

Digital Ground Clear (Gloss): A clear gloss ground for use on most porous surfaces where clarity is desired to view underlying materials.

Digital Ground for Non Porous Surfaces: A clear gloss ground for coating non-porous surfaces, such as plastic and metal, when clarity is desired.

All these different types of Digital Grounds are available in a sample pack so you can try them out before you decide whether you want to invest in the larger size bottles. The sample pack includes 2oz bottles of each of the three types of Digital Grounds plus a tub of Gel Topcoat in both gloss and semi-gloss. The topcoats are for use when printing on paper and other surfaces which I’ll cover in future postings, but today and for the next few postings in the series, I’ll be testing various types of fabric.

Bubble Jetset vs Digital Grounds
Just a sidenote: The main difference between Bubble Jetset solution or printing directly onto fabric, and the digital grounds is that the Bubble Jetset solution soaks into your fabric leaving a soft hand to the fabric. The digital grounds is painted onto your fabric more or less sealing the fibers and creating a smooth surface on top of the fabric. It leaves the fabric with a slightly crisp hand but often in textile art the hand of the fabric is not an important issue.

When you print using Bubble Jetset solution the inks are absorbed into the fabric. When you print using digital grounds, the inks attach to the smooth painted surface. The result using the digital ground (when it works successfully) is a much crisper image with much more saturated color and it’s clearly superior to using BJ solution or no solution at all.

This also now gives you the option of printing on textured fabric as you’ll see in some upcoming samples.

Now for the samples
The first sample I tried was on a piece of white pfd 200ct (or thereabouts) 100% cotton. I painted a piece of fabric with 2″ strips of each of the different types of Digital Grounds and I also left a strip of fabric untreated. I thought this was the best way to do a comparison print using all the different types of Digital Grounds.

The coatings certainly changed the hand of the fabric and after it dried the fabric was left with a stiff and crackly feel to it. The underside of the strip painted with the Digital Ground for non-porous surfaces also had a slight shine to it like plastic and the white matte Digital Grounds completely covered the fabric like a thin coating of paint on both sides of the fabric.

It was also a little difficult to iron out the wrinkles and creases but I was able to remove the stubborn wrinkles with a brayer when I pressed the fabric onto a full size sticky label, in a similar way as I did for this technique.

I printed out a simple image made up of strips of different colors. I did two separate prints on the same fabric sample, the first on my old Lexmark printer with Photo setting, and the second on my good Epson with Durabrite inks, also with Photo setting. The results were the same regardless of the printer.

The Results
The results were a little surprising.

The best result was achieved using the white matte digital ground. The colors are vibrant and strong.

The next best result was the strip of fabric without any coating of digital ground at all. The colors are strong but not near as strong or saturated as on the white matte.

The strips using the Digital Ground Clear Gloss and for porous surfaces were very similar, in fact to my eye the same, and both showed very poor results with the colors looking washed out and faded.

Now the sunset image below was done with a similar strip painting of the different digital grounds but on a piece of 100% cotton muslin. The results don’t show up very well on the photo which was why I did a second sample using simple color strips, but if you look closely at the sunset image you can just see the demarcation lines of the painted strips.

The white matte (far right of the image) again gave the best result with a rich strong color. The sections painted with digital grounds (center) however, gave the next best result with the untreated section of the fabric (far left) giving the poorest result. This may be because the muslin is cream colored rather than white, but I think it’s because the muslin has a very low thread count and is slightly fuzzy on the surface. The coating of digital grounds had the effect of preparing a totally smooth surface and the fuzzies disappeared underneath the coating. Also, once the print had dried, the hand of the fabric softened a bit and didn’t feel quite so stiff.

So there you have it for the cottons and I guess the moral is “always do a test first” although I expect that if the fabric has a slightly rough, textured or fibrous surface, the digital ground will serve to provide a good surface for printing and I might try some other textured cotton surfaces in future tests to confirm this. I’m not sure why the product failed on the high thread count fabric.

However I’ll be testing different types of fabrics over the coming days and weeks, and tomorrow you’ll see the results using organza. So check in often to the series; there’s some interesting stuff happening. If you’ve done some testing with this product leave a comment and let us know what you think about it.

If you’re not sure how digital ground is applied, the following video demonstrates how to use it on paper. The process is very similar for fabric.