Thursday 26 April 2012

Lazertran on wood portrait

 At last, here is my first ever image transfer project complete - a lazertran on wood portrait of Ellis. I'm pleased with the final result - I think the success with this final piece comes down to having an image that's really powerful, with strong lines. Here's a summary of how it was done.
1. I stripped all the colour from my photo in Photoshop. I also used various filters to create a comic style image, maximising contrasts to get strong black lines.
2. Sized the image in Photoshop so it would fit exactly on the wooden board. and reversed the image as it gets put back in its original direction when the decal is applied.
3. Printed off the image onto lazertran paper, and separated the decal in water. Then realised a day later that I'd printed it on completely the wrong side!
3. Printed off the image again, left the paper to dry overnight.
4. The next day, I cut carefully around the outline of my image, soaked it in water and separated the decal from the paper backing.
5. Left the decal to dry.
6. Painted my wooden board with pure turpentine, then laid the image flat. This was very fiddly as the decal is very flimsy!
7. Pushed out the airbubbles and voila!

I've yet to paint it with protective varnish, but anyway, I'm just so pleased to have done a project and finished something that's been in my head for ages! I'm so excited by the potential of image transfer. I'd love to do more of these type of portraits on beautiful pieces of wood.

3 comments:

  1. Wow Cath it's brilliant!! Can't wait to see what you do with your lazertran paper next. xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is really great, well done. It's funny I was just thinking about this stuff this week and wondering where or if you could still get it. I used to use lazertran when I was at uni years ago now and put it on ceramics. I was thinking I would love to decorate some vintage plates for my wall. I used to fire them in a kiln but I'm sure you can do it in an oven if it's just for decoration. Maybe I will look for some and give it a try. xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've been debating whether to get a kiln at some point especially to do ceramic transfers as I love them so much. Apparently there's cheaper lazertran style paper you can get on a website called craftycomputerpaper. x

      Delete