Digital to analogue – and back: How a Canon multifunction printer expands collage artist Beth Fraser's creative process

Beth Fraser creates highly stylised fashion illustrations, and increasingly self-led artworks, in a distinctive collage-based style, often enhanced with mixed media. Her work has been used for art prints, advertising posters, bespoke home wares, and illustrations in Vogue and other publications. In 2019 she was a runner-up in Harper's Bazaar UK's annual fashion illustration competition, and in 2020 the magazine named her as one of its "High Profile Female Artists to Watch".

Although she may post her work on social media and deliver commissioned pieces digitally, she is all about handcrafting: she builds her striking layered artworks by physically cutting out paper shapes, assembling them by hand, and optionally painting or drawing on them.

The Canon PIXMA TS6540i has become the hub of her process. It's her gateway between the digital and the analogue, and Beth uses it going in each direction. With its high-res flatbed scanner, it enables her to bring patterns, textures and sketches into her digital treasury of raw materials; as a superior quality wireless printer, it lets her make these elements and many more into the physical building blocks she uses to craft her works.

Beth says using the PIXMA TS6540i makes everything easier and quicker. In the past, she would cut out pieces of fabric as well as coloured card to use in her collages. She painted on card to add a variety of texture, such as brush strokes, rather than just flat colours. "I would often draw a pattern such as a gingham or a zebra print or something, and then cut that up – but you do get a bit precious, because you've spent ages doing this one pattern, and then if you get it wrong you have to do it again."

Now, with the PIXMA TS6540i, she has scanned fabrics and hand-drawn patterns, and prints them when wanted. She can keep them on file, ready to use at any time. "I can even plan a bit more digitally, because I can check that it is something I want to do before fully committing. And then I can scan the finished product as well, and even have that on file. It's just never-ending."

Beth scrupulously avoids downloadable textures and image elements found online. "Especially if it's a commercial job, I need everything to be something that I've made, for copyright reasons. And also the good ones cost money, and I don't want to do that." Instead, she has crafted her own and scanned them into her personal toolkit. For example, "I spent an afternoon shading with a crayon, very naive and rough, and made a curved one and a straight one. Then I can print it bigger or smaller or taller. It's a great shortcut."

The high resolution and colour fidelity of the PIXMA TS6540i's scanner are key for Beth, and a vast improvement over using her phone camera to digitise things, which she tried in the past. She uses a lot of found materials – lace, crochet, intricately patterned doilies, as well as fabrics ranging from a gingham to a multi-coloured tartan. "I scanned my loose canvas the other day and it captured all its little weave. And then, the textured papers. I choose them specifically because they have a nice grain to them, and it picks all of that up. And when you rip a piece of paper and you've got all that texture on its edge. They're all invaluable to me, all those little details.

"I think my best example of that was a combo with fabric and paper. The fabric comes up really nice, and it captures all the frayed edges. But the best part was the really fine details of the lace. I could zoom in on them in Adobe Photoshop¹ and it's got it all. That was the bit I used to struggle to capture before, using my phone camera. But yeah, the scanner got it all, and I could then go in and take sample bits of that and use them elsewhere."

Beth has also scanned her sketchbooks, partly to archive them and partly to use elements from them in various ways. "I only really draw with black and white, but used photo mode rather than document mode to scan, so captured the edge of the sketchbook, the textures and imperfections. Then I can do every page and slice them together and animate those. That sort of thing is really good for social media, because people love seeing a sketchbook, often more than the final artwork that you've spent weeks on!"

Beth does offer her original collages for sale, but mostly she sells prints of them. Until now, these have been up to around A2 size, although she says "I think that's just a personal preference because that's what I would want in my house." Her commercial works could naturally be blown up much larger, for something like a bus stop ad or even a vinyl mural on the side of a building. But even then, Beth actually creates her collages at a manual scale. "I think just visually when I'm making it, I want to be able to see the whole figure," she explains. This means that producing prints at the PIXMA TS6540i's maximum of A4 size would be feasible, and could potentially even open up a broader market for Beth's artworks.

Beth usually outsources the printing, but finds it stressful to have to wait for her prints to come back and check them. "I want to quality-control it and sign it off before I send it out." She feels that, on suitable premium papers, the prints from the PIXMA TS6540i will be good enough quality to sell, and she'll have the added benefit of controlling the whole process. She was very pleased with the results she achieved, for example, on Canon Photo Paper Pro Luster LU-101, a heavier photo paper with a traditional photolab look, and Canon Matte Photo Paper MP-101, a lighter paper with a less glossy matte finish.

In addition, the PIXMA TS6540i is useful for all the everyday printing jobs around the home and office. "I even appreciate having a printer to print mailing labels and all that professionally, instead of just scribbling addresses on a tube."

For immediate copies, Beth has simply used the controls on the printer – "you just press the button, and it comes straight out." In the same way, she prints from her laptop, which she has connected to the printer using a cable. For scanning, however, she relies on the Canon PRINT app on her smartphone. "It feels like a sort of remote control for the scanner,” she comments. “It asks you whether you want to send the scan to your laptop or your phone, which is great because I've kept a copy of everything on my phone ready to go straight on Instagram. Even when I'm just scanning little bits – accessories or something like a tiny little cut-out handbag or a shoe – then I get that to my phone. So I've kept those on my phone before then sending them to my laptop to cut out and play with."

Beth does not add effects or borders to her prints, although she will use the Canon PRINT app when she prints to level a tilted image and crop it to suit her needs. "But in terms of filters, I don't really need them, because I want it to be as close as possible to the original."

The speed of the PIXMA TS6540i impressed Beth. "I work very fast anyway. I think that's why I got into collage in the first place, because it was just such a quick way of getting colour down and I didn't have to wait for anything to dry. You get a very instant effect. It's also very instant with the scanner – the image is on my phone within a few seconds and I can carry on. The printer is also very fast. It's like prints were just flying out."

Beth couldn't resist experimenting with the printing. She tried printing on the wrong side of the paper, so the outcome is more "low-fi", and printing in black and white on coloured paper – "there's something retro about that." She enjoyed printing a second time over a print, adding a new dimension to her usual physical layering – "putting a print back in the printer, then just printing something like a handbag but on top of a figure that's already there on the paper. Gradually you get the colours build up and things are layered, a bit like screen printing, and the different layers are not quite in alignment, so the hat is slightly to the left of the head or slightly to the right. I love all those little bits. You see different layers coming through."

Much of Beth's creative process involves such experimentation, spontaneity, and happy accidents. "I do think with collage, you can create as you go. Even that random bit of paper that's cut out from two weeks ago will suddenly be really useful in this one. Plus, you can just angle things, so you can suddenly tilt a head, and you're like, yeah, that's actually great. But in the drawing, I hadn't planned that. So you don't have to erase something or paint over anything. You can kind of just move stuff."

In this aesthetic, scanned image elements are particularly versatile – you can print them larger, print in different colours, combine them or cut out small details of them. The Canon PIXMA TS6540i enables Beth to digitise fabrics, patterns, sketches and other materials, then print them in high resolution straight from her phone or laptop as required, ready to cut out, assemble and manipulate. Ultimately, it will enable her to produce saleable prints, as well as digitise both finished pieces and works-in-progress, which in turn can be printed out and reused again in a limitless creative cycle.


Written by Alex Summersby