So I've had a hard time with transferring images. I normally use a charcoal pencil and go over my image and then transfer it on to my carving material. Well, I been done more and more detailed carvings and so it's hard to do the charcoal transfer.
I've tried regular pencil transfer. I did it with my newest card but I don't like it. It doesn't come out very clear and I spent over an hour going over the image with the pencil. I haven't really tried any other of the transfers. I either don't have room for an iron board or I don't have the chemicals on hand.
Last year a student teacher in my photography class was talking to me about a Mod Podge transfer using this glue type stuff. I looked up online and you can use this stuff for so many things. You can transfer images over to just about anything. They have Mod Podge sealants, glues, jewelry finish, all kinds of stuff! So I thought about what would happen if you did this transfer on some pink stuff. I asked on the boards and it looks like no one has tried this, so I picked up some photo transfer Mod Podge and gave it a try.
Here are my findings:
To do the transfer it was pretty easy. You print out your image, cut it out, put the solution onto the image. And put it face down onto the medium you've chosen(I used 2009 pink stuff). However, now you must wait 24 hours.
After that. You let a soakingish wet sponge or towel sit on it for two minutes. Then you rub away the paper. But, if you rub too much it'll rub off the image. What it is pretty much doing is transferring the image and a thin layer of paper onto the carving material. Than it has to dry.
Next its time to carve. I tried this transfer first on a smaller image that I had on hand but the paper it was on was much thicker then regular printer paper. Anything thicker than printer paper kind of makes it harder to carve.
Since this time I tried it on a larger image the results where much different than the small image. Carving it was great in some place sham others. It looks like to have the blade just glide right through you practically had to have most of the image gone.
The transfer made the material more reluctant and a bit harder to carve with a gouge. It was okay using a knife though.
When the image transfers it transfers all the white space around your image too. I cut out part of the white space and left some of it. It's actually better to leave the white space because a sort of rim type thing forms along the edge of the image making that area raised.
I only carved part of my image because I didn't want to do the entire thing then find out it was not a good transfer method. So when I stamped the image here is what I found:
Lines are not straight and look awful. Due to the transfer making the material resistant to the gouge and a bit of the knife, this is probably why everything wasn't straight. Also, when you put the solution on, if it is not 100% smooth it leaves lines from the brush that then ends up on the surface image creating the lines in the image that were not cut.
So the Mod Podge transfer doesn't make the grated carve or stamped image. I wouldn't recommend this method of transfer. I was hoping that this would really work, but I guess not. Oh well. Now we all know! Feel free to try it yourself. Maybe someone will get a better result than I did.
=(^._.^)=
