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| > Acrylic Transfer Guide [Clay Hardwick & Morgan Welch] |
First step is to choose your imagery. You will need to have whatever you are wanting to transfer printed on a larger copier using a heat-fused process that is found in most copy machines or xerox machines. My recommendation is to design or arrange your imagery on your computer, print it out at home, then take it somewhere to have it copies using a basic black/white xerox copier. (This is important because basic inkjet printers print their inks in a different way and you get unclean or blurry transfers) Your copied image should be the size you are wanting it to be on whatever you are transferring it to. Now you can transfer this image to nearly any surface, but read the rest of the guide to understand why some surfaces are easier than others. (Canvas and most woods work well... some friends I know have done great fabric transfers though). Next, paint your acrylic medium onto your surface where your copied image will appear. There are many types of acrylic mediums you can get, but basically acrylic paint can potentially work. Usually clear is just preferred because, well... it is clear. There are different weights and gloss preferences. This really doesn't matter, it is your choice. I like my mediums runny or 'liquidy' just to give the smoothest transfer results. Rub your image face down onto your surface so that the acrylic medium is spread evenly over your image you plan to transfer. Press down firmly and rub using your hand, but preferable a spoon, a roll of tape sideways works well, or any flat, hard, smooth surface. Make sure you work most wrinkles and air bubbles out. After about a minute of rubbing and getting it smooth and pressed, the really difficult part comes in: WAIT! Sometimes it might take up to 4 to 6 hours of drying for this to work. It depends on the room humidity, temperature, etcetera. If you absolutely can not wait, put it out in the sun for at least 45 minutes. I usually transfer my images late at night then wait overnight and have some dreams before I wake up to peeling off the paper. Your choice. I have had a friend who intentionally peeled off his paper too soon to get really spotty, rough looking transfers. In his case, it was really cool. Experiment! So this leads onto the next step: Once your image has completely dried to your surface, you must remove the paper but not the ink. It sounds like magic, but when the medium dried it bonded with the heat-fused ink that came from your copy machine and became one with each other. The paper was not so special or friendly therefore he simply just sits on top of the two, wishing he could bond. But, the paper really is just glued to the surface and can be removed as long as you didn't put any acrylic medium ONTOP of the paper. So to get the paper off, there are many ways to do this, but a few ways work best for me. It is important to use water to ease this process. If you can get a spray bottle, great. If not, just rub water onto a small portion of your paper. Gentle rub the paper away. This will take some getting used to, but shouldn't be too difficult. If you rush, you may rub too hard or for too long in one spot and the ink will come off as well. This is inevitable to happen, but you may want to try to limit this. Take your time and be gentle with it. The water really makes it smooth and easy. You may try using a sponge or rag to rub the paper off instead of your fingers. If you are doing twenty transfers on a wood surface, you will understand once the blisters set in pretty quickly.
And that should basically do it. If you have any questions or comments for this process, I'd love to hear from you! I do a lot of acrylic transferring and would love to hear what you think or how it worked for you. email me at clay@echomech.com
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This guide will give you the basic procedure for transferring printed imagery using acrylic medium onto nearly any surface.
