Image Transfer

Here are the results from my image transfer class. To see more detail click on the image.

This first group used gel medium. You paint it on your image then press down on to fabric. Note: all images will be reversed. Not realizing this before hand I took a lot of word images to class which I couldn't use.

After it dries you "scrub" away the paper. You do not peel it away, you need the gel to stay on your fabric with the image on it.

The best image was the bird which was a black & white print done with a laser printer. The cricket was printed with an ink jet printer and I saw some of the color wash out as I was removing the paper. The other images were from magazine pages and as you can see were a bit fragile, parts of them came away with the paper. But they are clear images with a clear background (shows the fabric).

The next group used Gesso, the stuff that painters use to prepare their canvasses. Gesso is white and paints your fabric white, it can also be tinted.

I had a lot of areas where the image wrinkled which caused those large blotches. The instructions said to paint both your fabric and the image but if I try it again I'm going to do a thick layer of the gesso on the fabric and slowly apply my image smoothing for the center to see if this avoids the wrinkles. Really hard with larger pictures to avoid wrinkles.

The shoe picture came out great, it was from a catalog, the paper was thick and slick. In fact when I was soaking it the paper just floated off.

For all the images I just used my finger to rub the paper off after I had let them soak in warm water. All the ones done from magazine pager were pretty fragile, it was hard to remove the paper and not damage the image.