Heat transfer processes - day 3

First of all, here's a picture of one of the heat presses - the top plate heats up to the temperature set on the display, and also on the display you can set the time. To put work into the press, you use the black handle to swing the plate aside, then lay the work on the teflon sheet, cover it with another teflon sheet, and pull down the grey handle to lock it in place. When the buzzer goes off, you pull the little black knob beside the handle and lift up the handle, swing the plate aside and take out the work. It's a kind of extreme ironing - but the machines cost about £1K.

The day was about photo transfer, and we'd brought along photos (or scans) printed onto photo transfer paper. I had used a photo of branches dipping into water to make six different colourways, by using the channels in Levels in Photoshop (in a few days, I'll post how this is done). I'd brought along some pale linen to see how the background colour affected the colours of the transfer -

The photos were cut into strips and tried on the various linens, and they all worked quite well - probably because they were such strong and "simple" colours. The only bit really affected by the background was the pale area. 

The phototransfer comes out quite shiny (as on the left below) and a little trick is to put it back in the press, once the paper is peeled off, for a few seconds, to take off some of the shine - can you actually see a difference, or does the angle of the light obscure that? btw the settings for phototransfer are temp 180C, 15 seconds. 

Another thing you can do with the photo transfer paper is to draw on it with oil pastels -

My drawings (based on the branches in the water) are too wispy - in between the lines is the shinyness of the transfer medium. It's better to have nice solid shapes, and cut the paper as close to them as you can.

We also did screenprinting with pigments (in binder). Mixing colours on the screen is something I'd done before, but using flour as a resist was new to me, and doesn't it give a wonderful effect -

The grey might end up as a sky in something sometime, and the other was used immediately as a base for a  photo transfer (with the bits that were left) -

My favourite piece of the day - in fact, a bit of a breakthrough.

Dawn's slideshow of artists who use photo transfer included Natasha Kerr (via) -

Silja Puranen, who prints onto actual carpets -

Paddy Hartley, with uniforms such as these (do go to his website and look closely) -

Shelley Goldsmith's printed children's dresses, an installation called Flood (via) -

Ann Therese Yndestad's bag was used in Dawn's book (via)-

Heather Belcher, printing onto felt -