Playing mad scientist in my studio

My friend Joseph left to drive back to California yesterday afternoon, so I spent some time in my studio playing mad scientist, or possibly experimental artist.
Joseph had 1000 fliers printed and he and I folded all of them. He had some left over and asked if I wanted them. I've had this blender pen for years and years and never used it. In fact, I'm surprised it wasn't all dried up. I danced with glee when I noticed they were toner copies and decided to try the blender pen technique.

This stuff smells, but it is well worth it. I knew I would have a challenge because you always copy words backwards for this technique. However, I always work with what I have, so decided to go with a grunge look.

In case you don't know what a blender pen is, it is by Chartpak. I believe it contains Xylene. You place the page toner side down on the material or paper and swipe the pen over the places you want to transfer. It's immediate and you need very little rubbing, although you need more on the silk than on paper.

If it worked so well on silk, would it also work on Tyvek? I grabbed a scrap left over from when I painted the Tyvek about a week or so ago, and tried it. Yep, it worked fantastic on Tyvek, too.

Pressing my luck even further, I tried it on an unfinished ATC. The blender pen worked wonderfully here, too, even getting ink on the Portrait, which is a magazine image. I loved the subtle color it gave and the different ways it penetrated various pieces of the background paper. If you click on the image, you will see these subtle differences even better.

I then tried using the blender pen to transfer magazine images, but all it did was smear the ink onto the end of the blender pen tip and make a huge mess. I managed to get some subtle colors for the background on the ATC, though, including when I tried to clean the pen tip.

It's been awhile since I actually just played in my studio and I had a lot of fun experimenting with this process. I'll be playing more with this technique in the future, since I now have so many toner based photocopies to play with.