Can you REALLY make full color ceramic decorations with a LASER printer?

 Yes, you REALLY can print full color ceramic decorations with a LASER printer.

Want to de-bottleneck your ceramic decorating capacity or inexpensively start your own decorating business, even at home? 

Ceramic decorating goes all the way back to prehistoric man and woman painting cave walls and clay pots with colored dirt on their fingers.  Some artists still use this technique today.  Over the years many techniques improved the process, but ceramic decorating remained a fairly messy, slow, expensive and environmentally challenging liquid process.  Liquid glazes and liquid ceramic cover coats using acetone, MEK, Naphtha and other organic solvents have been used for essentially all ceramic decorating.  Water based glazes have eliminated the nasty smells of those organic solvents, but the process is still messy.  Finger paintings gave way to brush strokes and then woven silk screens and now photosensitized screen production but still messy.  Try cleaning one of those screens sometime.  Pad printing, flood coating, hand painting and a variety of variations of these processes came along but all require the use of liquid glazes that inevitably demand clean up and careful disposal.  Even at this moment, most of the millions of people who work in ceramics have no idea that a simple, computer-to-print press of a mouse click can result in a full color, photographic resolution, ceramic decals made from their original art, a photograph, or any of millions of images available for download on their computer. It comes as a great surprise to most people who work in ceramics. But for those who are already using digital ceramic decorating, they can enjoy all the benefits that are typical of digital processes, efficiency, low cost, high quality and a great boost to productivity.

The cleanliness that results from the dry application of ceramic cover coat (another of Michael’s amazing ideas) eliminates hazards to the operator, hazards to the environment and reduces the drying time of a decal to 0 seconds. It is always dry – until you dip it water. Screen printed ceramic cover coats take hours to dry. Many who use digital ceramic printing in their business will never have the experience of smelling the noxious fumes associated with ceramic cover coats. Thanks to Michael.

You might be thinking “Where’s the beef?”  You can see small sampling at

https://www.pinterest.com/enduringimage/

 Ron Manwiller

303 278 8868 / rmanwiller@enduring-images.com