Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
DIY Wintergreen Oil and Solvent Image Transfers
In this demonstration, we’re going to make a wintergreen or solvent image transfer. The
solvent-based materials that you can use are anything from nail polish remover, acetone,
mineral spirits, or wintergreen oil, and they vary in terms of toxicity. And what you do
in this process is you take a piece of printed information, and that can come from anywhere.
You can take a book and put it on a photocopy machine or a drawing or a photograph or any
combination of them. You can create it digitally and print it out on an inkjet printer. But
the piece of information that you use to transfer it needs to be freshly copied on a photocopier
that uses toner. So try and avoid the high-end fancy copiers, whether it’s a laser printer
or inkjet printer, but you really need sort of the things that they have in public libraries
or post offices or pharmacies that has a lot of toner on the print itself.
Once you make your image, the closer it is to having been printed on that copier, the
better it is for the transfer process, because you need to be able to use the solvent, whether
it’s nail polish remover or wintergreen oil, to release the toner from the image.
So what you’ll have is a printed image copied on a photocopier that you’re going to transfer
onto whatever surface you want to transfer it onto, and in this instance I’m using
this monoprint that I made that has this kind of painterly landscape. And one of the things
that’s advantageous about this image transfer process using a solvent is that it creates
this kind of dreamy atmospheric painterly image. So I’m taking an image that began
photographically and I’m transferring it to something that came through a printmaking
process so they exist on the same sheet.
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to take one of my photocopied images and I’m
going to apply it, I’m going to place it where I want it on my monoprint, and I’m
going to use the wintergreen oil for this.
You can use, as I said, you can use any of these things, nail polish remover is probably
the least expensive and the easiest to come by, but probably the most toxic, so make sure
you do it in a well ventilated environment. The wintergreen, you’ll find you might get
a headache or something, so do it near an open window. I’m using a cotton swab or
a Q-tip and I’m going to moisten it with enough wintergreen oil that the cotton is
wet, but you don’t really need that much of it. In fact, burnishing is more important
than lots of liquid, so I’m just going to moisten the back of it evenly with the, with
the wintergreen oil and as you do it, you’ll see that your image is already starting to
appear on the page.
And then I’m going to use this metal, back of this metal spoon. You can use plastic or
wood to burnish it. And the more you do in terms of burnishing, the sharper your transfer
is going to be. Some people like it, sort of atmospheric and hazy, and so the burnishing
can be relatively quick.
Some of the distinctions that you’ll find if you use wintergreen oil, you get a lot
of the toner will release and so some of the blacks are really rich, but there’s also
sort of a haze that’s left around the image. And if you want it cleaner without this sort
of gray halo around it, some of the more toxic substances like mineral spirits or acetone
might be a better option.
Whichever you use, shortly after you finish, you’ll see sort of a wet area, and that
will dry up over time.
So I’m going back and forth between making sure that the solvent material is evenly applied
and that I’m careful to burnish evenly across the image.
You can get more than one image transferred from each photocopy, but just to be aware
of that, each subsequent image is more like a ghost. So for instance, if I wanted ten
of these bicycles to make their way across this landscape, I could use the same print
ten times, but the last one would be almost invisible.
And I’m peeling back my paper to make sure that my burnished image has transferred and
it looks great. I’ll just hold that up for the camera.
This is another image of a work made using image transfer. And so it uses the same type
of wintergreen oil as a solvent or transfer process, and the advantage to this type of
transfer process is that that image that came out of a print and some typeset text went
through a photocopier, was transferred to this heavyweight water color paper, and then
using a sewing machine and a heavy needle, was stitched through so you can see the layers
of fabric. And it makes what had started as a pretty ephemeral piece of paper into a pretty
substantial image.