Photo transfers

Things got a bit busy with preparing for my show for Contact and starting new classes so it's been a while. But here's some work I've been doing to prove I was doing something while away from here.

Quiet Through Tunnel

I'm taking a course in photo transfers and painting. The primary way being used to transfer an image onto a substrate is with tar gel. It's actually pretty simple and you just use the cheapest paper too (makes a change). Above is my first effort with a photo of a sign that I took in San Francisco applied to a painted panel and then painted around. I tried using leveling gel to make the edges of the photo transfer less obvious. It created an almost resin-like coating. This was not my goal. It didn't really do its leveling magic but I'm happy with the results.

Now onto project #2 and more San Francisco images. This is a bigger panel (the other one was 8 x 10 and this one is 20 x 20). Below are all of the tar gel images with paper rubbed off waiting to be applied to the gesso panel. They're quite shiny so the shininess of the leveling gel at least ties everything together but then loads of varnish would too.

One you've seen before

North Beach hotel

California 

tram

Here we have the panel waiting for painting. This time I applied the images first rather than painting first. I'm going to try to build around the edges of the transfers so they looked more like they are part of the panel rather than applied. We'll see.

now pasted onto panel