Making a Photo Transfer …

This picture of my husband’s cousin was taken last fall where she lives in Tel Aviv. Her name is Noga, and she’s lovely, tender and rather ephemeral. Knowing that I’m an artist, she wanted me to take pictures of her and make “something” special. I was pleased that she asked me, but I had I no idea how I was going to capture her in an interesting way … in a way that gave homage to her uniqueness.

The photographs I took, while the family bustled around us serving a small feast, did not do her justice. They were taken with my little point & shoot Canon PowerShot, which is a fantastic camera for traveling but does have its limitations.  Or, I must say, I have limitations when under pressure to get good focus, good light and good expression. ( I heard once that “a photographer is not known by what he takes, but by what he shows”!)

Anyway, now I was really limited by the pictures I did have . What to do? (Here you might go back and read my first post #1 What to Paint? ) I decided to try a photo transfer on to a canvas which would give me the possibility of making something painterly while having a good image. Unfortunately, I no longer have Photoshop on my computer, so I enlisted the help of my daughter, Amy, who lives in Arizona.

I sent her the cropped photo. She removed the color and pushed the contrast to almost black and white, eliminating most of the grey. After she reversed the image she emailed it back to me. I printed it out on HP Everyday, matte, photo paper with my Canon MP 280 printer.  Meanwhile I prepared an 8 x 8 in gallery canvas with 2 coats of gesso and applied acrylic paint where I thought the photo would be enhanced. I removed the excess white paper and generously applied Golden Fluid Matte Medium to the image and quickly pressed it onto the canvas. Any air bubbles need to be smoothed out at this point! Then I applied weight onto the canvas – paint cans, books, bricks, anything and everything until the paper dried … several hours for this.

The fun part and the scary part is removing the paper! If all has been well, the paper can be removed, while the inked image will stay. All you have to do is wet the paper and start gently rubbing it away from the ink with fingers. Sometimes the image comes off as well. Sometimes only part of the image comes off and this can look quite interesting. One never knows.

Luckily for me in this case the image stayed on very well. I removed as much paper as possible, added more acrylic paint and some pencil lines. With hardware store stencils I applied “Le Belle” using acrylic paints with a little Golden Iridescent Gold Deep fluid acrylic. On top of all that was carefully brushed several coats of a mixture of Matte Medium and GAC 100.

The result ended up not too badly.