Printing on Birch Bark

When I heard we would have two school days with a title ”Printing on different materials”, I immediately had an idea that I wanted to test out.

I called my mom and asked if she’d have any spare birch bark for me to try printing on. She gave me two generous pieces and was pretty interested about my idea.

It’s pretty on trend to print on plywood, many companies offer that option, but on bark, I’ve never seen that before, and neither had the teacher. I’m sure someone somewhere has done it, but I’d think it would still be pretty rare to see an image printed on it.

Natural material like this obviously offers quite the challenge both technically and artistically. It’s not an expensive material per se, but you need to find some, get permission from the forest owner and it can only be harvested at a certain time of the year. Then you also have to have the skills to do it carefully and try and find the smoothest pieces with the least branch markings.

Now that you have the material, you’ll need a printer that’s been designed to print on uneven surfaces, and skills to operate it. It was soooo cool to get to try this, with the teacher doing most of the button pressing though.

I had picked four different kind of nature scene images to try. My plan was to use the more uneven bark to try the images on first to see which one works the best, and then print one of them larger on the better piece.

On the test piece the printer head apparently ran into the bark and stopped printing so we had to lower the table and start again. It worked surprisingly well even over the branch markings. The darker images were disqualified immediately, bark along with the UV drying special ink made them look so dark that there were almost no detail to them. The lighter images looked way better and I chose the foggy one to be printed larger.

I did want it to show up a bit better and was told about the possibility on printing with white first and then the image on top. We did that and I’m not completely happy with it. Yes the image shows up now, but it looks too plasticy because there is too much white. We tried to lower the amount of white on a little piece but it didn’t work that way and we had no material to try again .

Usually with printing you try and make changes multible times but with a scarce material like bark you don’t get many tries and the results are unpredictable.

I’m super interested and inspired to create more with birch bark, so I’m hoping I can bribe my mom to give me more bark, the school to let me use the printer, and the teacher for his expertise.

To be continued