We recently bought a few low cost and low quality ways to make thermal prints. It was an idea my partner Gayla and I both had for some time without either of us acting upon it. We both wanted a form of low committal analogue output to use in a variety of not fully discovered art projects.
Both of us had been nudged back into thinking and action by recently seeing other artists incorporate thermal printing into their work. Gayla sourced a few different toy camera and printer options in the $20–40 range and placed some orders.
Not knowing exactly what the outcome or the plan is, tracks with much of both of our art processes over the years. We each like to explore and discover how and what we make by learning and doing.
For me, the first thing I was drawn to was the coarse dithered black only rendering of the thermal images. Some of the thermal print options will output more tonal “greyscale” images but I really prefer the prints that are crappier and even a bit harsh in their dithering process.
I wondered about blowing up the textures of the prints for a variety of images and using them as collage materials. And I likely will do that. But the first thing that has piqued my interest is printing out images of my Red Book drawings. I am printing to a ~$20 thermal printer that uses a 57mm-wide roll of paper. This is the exact same kind of paper store receipts get printed to. There is nothing precious and certainly not archival about this as a material and that is much of the point.
These tiny images and the way they strip and condense the details of my drawings are interesting to me. I don’t think of them as a way to actually reproduce my drawings but more as a lateral way of using that work to make something connected but new.
I don’t know what that will be yet and that’s the exciting part.