An Acrylic Transfer is a very simple but effective technique which uses gel mediums and photographs combined to make an interesting image.
Sometimes we have a photograph or image that we would love to use within an artwork, but we cannot us the original for various reasons, this is where this technique can come into play.
An acrylic transfer basically grabs the ink layer of a copied or printed material and embeds it into the acrylic skin or film.
CREATING AN ARTWORK INCORPORATING A PHOTOGRAPHIC TRANSFER Materials
Photocopies of Photograph
Medium – Gel, liquid or self levelling
( I like to use Golden soft gel gloss or Polymer Medium gloss)
Sponge, squeegee, flannel
Substrate, canvas, tile, wood,
CREATING A PHOTOGRAPHIC TRANSFER
1) You first need to make your acrylic transfer, so to do this you need to apply a layer of acrylic medium over the printed image (usually a photocopy).
2) Let the medium dry completely. (This may take a few hours up to couple of days).
3) Once the image is completely dry, we need to remove the paper. Wet the back of the image and remove the paper. You can do this by rubbing gently with your fingers and thumbs being very careful not to remove the ink of the acrylic skin that is left. There maybe a little paper left on the acrylic skin, but don’t worry about this, as once you adhere the skin to your painting you will not see the paper.
4) Set the transfer aside to dry completely.
CONGRATULATIONS YOU HAVE JUST CREATED YOUR FIRST ACRYLIC TRANSFER
Photomontage turned into an Acrylic skin
This Acrylic skin still needs more of the paper background rubbed off… but this gives you an idea of how it turns out and how thin you can make them… the thickness of the skin is dependent on how much medium you apply to the photocopy… in this case I have only applied a very very small amount of medium as I only wanted the skin to be very thin!