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Today I am going to show you a technique for transferring images from a magazine onto a prepared surface.
To use gel transfer technique you will need a few things:
You will need your gel, I use a matt gel medium (an acrylic painting medium). Or you could use a gloss gel, thats fine too, it will just produce a glossy image.
You will need a surface. I am going to use canvas today, but you can use a prepared board.
You will need some water, a paint brush, scissors, and a pen. A spoon is good or you can use a roller. And you will need an image.
The first thing you will need is your image. I have chosen this one from the newspaper.
I chose this one because it has nice clear lines and bold colours. I think it will transfer quite well.
You will need a reverse-copy of this. You will need it done on a laser printer, If you use an inkjet printer it won't work
Making a reverse-copy is especially important if there is any text involved.
So I've printed my image, now I need it to be the right size for my canvas.
So I will just quickly draw around that.
And now I need to cut out anything that I don't want to be in there.
For this one I only want the birds, I don't want the ground, so I will cut it out. Be careful cutting out the image.
This is a tricky bit here with the feathers, I think I will just rip it to give it a feathered edge.
So now I have got my image. I have also cut out the little birds that were in the corner of the picture.
To get the image onto the canvas... First you need to prepare the canvas
I have just put a little bit of paint on it so it isn't completely white.
I will paint the gel onto the image and then stick it down onto the canvas.
Don't worry if you get some gel on the canvas because it will dry clear (even though it looks milky while it is wet).
Put a good amount on, but try not to stay on any one spot for long because it will start to lift the ink off quite quickly.
Now we will stick the image down. Try not to move it around too much once it is down.
And you want to try and get all the air bubbles out.
Use the spoon to get as many of the air bubbles out as you can. A roller can work quite well for small images that are on a hard surface.
So now we will leave this to dry, it will probably take one hour. But it will depend on how big it is, how much gel is on it and how warm it is.
You need to leave it unitll it is fully dry.
This is dry now, It has been about an hour. Now it is ready to rub off.
It is really quite an easy process to get the paper off.
It just involves water and your fingers. It is a matter of just dampening the paper and rubbing it with your fingers until all the paper comes off.
Use quite a bit of water, get the paper quite saturated.
This is were you will discover if you have any air bubbles as well because they will leave little holes in the picture.
I have rubbed away pretty much all of the paper. You can see there is still a little bit of residue I could keep working on
But the more you rub away the more chance there is to make holes in the gel.
You can varnish it or you can put Fat over the top. Fat is a special product you use for oil painting
It is better than using butter or oil from your kitchen although that may work ok.
That will soak in and get rid of any of the last bits of paper and bring the black out more.
So this is a really easy technique to do at home. It is really great fun to play around with.
You can use your own images or or photos and It is an excelent technique to have at your disposal for adding to your works.