Mixed Media Art with Avatrex by Michele Jackson

 

Flower Girl Mixed Media
Flower Girl 2 by Michele Jackson.

Michele Jackson creates surreal and intriguing images with ingenuity. A mixed-media artist who combines papers, paints and prints on wood using Photoshop to draft her vision, Jackson recently discovered Avatrex from LexJet.

Avatrex is not a film or a paper and does not act as a carrier to transfer the image. Instead, the image is printed in reverse on what is essentially an inkjet coating and is then applied to the substrate so that it conforms to and becomes part of the material to which it is applied using heat, a glue stick or a primer, depending on the application.

Flower Girl Mixed Media
Flower Girl by Michele Jackson.

Jackson uses a Uhu glue stick to apply her printed images. In the photos of the finished pieces, called Flower Girl, shown here, she designed the image in Photoshop, printed to Avatrex and applied to a flower-textured paper backed by a 1 1/2″ piece of wood.

“I like the transparency of Avatrex to show what’s underneath, but it doesn’t feel like a typical transparency paper; it feels like a regular film. People touch it and they can’t figure out what it is because it conforms to what’s underneath,” says Jackson. “It gives me a lot more flexibility with my mixed media work than I had before. It makes a nice, professional looking presentation.”

Ashes of Freedom Mixed Media
Ashes of Freedom by Michele Jackson.

Jackson also combines Avatrex with paper and paint, as she did with Ashes of Freedom, which includes layers of burnt paper as part of the media mix.

“In Photoshop, I’ll include the image that will be printed on Avatrex there as an overlay or dim the opacity so I can get a feel for how it will look and show underneath. Then I cut all my papers out and glue them down,” says Jackson. “Flower Girl was simple because it was all digital and applied to a textured paper. I’ve found that Avatrex works best on a light background; you don’t get as nice an effect on dark backgrounds.”