Printing a map on hand-made paper - experiences?

[Muside]

Hey everybody

Fantasy maps are usually designed complete with old paper textures. Now, for roleplaying purposes I thought it would add an extra bit of authenticity to print maps directly on hand-made paper, disposing of a layer for a paper texture.

I haven't found anything on this topic in the forum. Has anybody tried it yet? It must take a bit of effort because hand-made paper draws much more ink than industrial papers, and most home printers are unable to process these thick papers. But I've heard that it's supposed to be possible without going to a printing shop, if you have the right setup.

[Mouse]

What kind of hand made paper are we talking about. There are thousands of different kinds - different thicknesses, different colours, different absorbencies etc.

If you have yet to make the choice I would choose paler, rather than darker, and also less textured rather than more, because both these things affect the way the colours printed onto it look in the final result. For example, if you choose a pale blue variety, it really doesn't matter how thick you print the red ink, it will never look completely red unless you use acrylic paint thickly enough to be opaque, and do it by hand.

[Muside]

Well, currently I'm thinking of just printing simulated black ink lines (roads, placement of towns and settlements and the like) and then add borderlines in various acrylic colors by hand with a fine brush.

I was thinking of a not too thick paper, rather yellowish with a red tint (those that have this nice golden glow you often find with old paper) and, indeed, not too much structure to avoid ink spill.

So I suppose you got a bit of experience with hand-made papers?

[Mouse]

Not much, but I needed to know where to focus my thinking, and I'm sure the information will help others as well - others here who have more experience than I do.

My first thoughts are that most printers can cope with reasonably thick paper. I have a very cheap inkjet (which I never use), and I can adjust the settings using the print manager to tell it what kind of medium I want to print on - transparent film, ordinary paper, card... etc. If I was going to try and print on hand made paper I would get a lot more than I wanted to use for the final product, tell my printer how thick the paper is (this is usually the weight of the paper expressed in grammes per square metre, or the gsm of the paper) and print as if on card.

I wouldn't put anything thicker than about 120 gsm through a cheap printer like mine, though, which is barely a thin card. I really don't want to damage the rollers.

EDIT: the extra paper is for all those prints you will have to do while adjusting your printer and getting it just right

[kacey]

Printer paper is coated so you might have a hard time printing on hand made paper, but there are several companies that make specialty printer paper for fine art prints, you can even get printer paper that looks and feels just like water colour paper or canvas.

Most companies that make fine art printing paper have sample packs that you can buy really cheap to try out the different papers. I've tried Hahnemuhle, Moab, and red river papers, and they're all really nice, some of the fine art papers in the Hahnemuhle collection have a definite yellow tone to them which might bode well for a more antique look if that's what you're going for, and some of them are heavily textured, and one even has a tattered edge out of the box.

I'm not sure if all printers can handle the thicker papers that you can get from some of these companies, I use a Canon pixma pro 100 which is relatively cheap when it comes to wide format printers, and it does a really nice job of printing on the thicker paper.

I've been able to print digital drawings that actually look like real drawings because of some of the awesome papers you can get for printing these days.

I know I'm rambling on now, but I think I read some where, and forgive me I don't remember where, that you can buy a product to coat you're own paper so that it's printable...You might want to look into that, and just make sure that you're not going to damage you're printer by putting uncoated papers through it... I once accidentally put a heavy paper through on the uncoated side, and all the ink bubbled up, and made a real mess of my printer, just a heads up.

[Falconius]

There is also the possibility of taking it to a print shop, but I really don't know anything about that. And if you have a laser printer it doesn't use ink, so that may aid in transferring it to the paper. Another option with laser printers is to print it mirrored to photo paper I think (it has a shiny coating on it) and then you can flip that over onto your specialty paper and use an iron to iron it onto the paper. Or so I would think, I've never tried it, I've only used this technique once, to transfer a resist onto a copper clad board so I could "print" a custom circuit board.