Thank God it's friday - Wonderful Trees

Here's my piece 'Enchanted Forest', and if you want to know how I did it just keep reading :)

I started making a version for the trashcan :) unintentionally, but those things happen sometimes :) You see, the textured background was easy, that's just pulling a babywipe until you can see through it, gluing it down on thick watercolour paper and letting it dry. Don't colour it yet if you're going to use the transfer method below. I did, and that ruined my first piece :)

Then to what made several paperjams in my printer, but resulted in the look of the piece. I remembered reading somewhere that if you printed your image onto papertowel you got a transfer that was almost invisible. I decided to give it a shot and started out with a kleenex papertowel, some good results but the layers are so thin it often tore in the printing process, If you chose those papertowels, chose a sturdy background paper to hold the towel and the most important thing no matter what kind of papertowel you choose; TAPE ALL THE EDGES down to the backing paper!!! If you do this properly, make sure the tape is outside your printers printing area, so you don't print on the tape and loose part of your image. If you tape your papertowel properly, you'll avoid more than half the tearing I experienced, and using a sturdy background paper you should avoid the rest of my paperjam experiences :)

I ended up going to the kitchen looking for some sturdier papertowels and those superabsorbant thin layered ones worked for me :) So I finally got my transfer of the lady and the enchanted tree. I positioned it and glued it down. These transfers are seethrough transfers and that's why if you paint/colour your background beforhand you might want to paint a white area where your image is going, gesso works fine. Otherwise if the background is very dark your image will be difficult to see properly. (this is were I went wrong the firs time)

Glue it down and smooth it out gently, you don't want to tear it and have to do the printing all over again :)

I love the seethrough quality of these transfers, gives brilliant effects if you layer them too!! The papertowel is so thin that until I know of a better way to glue down images to textured backgrounds, this is it!! When you've placed all the images, it's time to bring out the colours!!

I also love stamping on papertowels and gluing them to my backgrounds, again, much easier to get a good result with your stamped image if your background is textured!!

I colourd with distress inks and used a gold and black dabber for the edges. For more examples of pieces using this technique, or this mixed with ordinary printed images, have a look at my entries to this weeks challenges at, Saturdays Workout, Saturday Surprise, Sunday postcard art (this time on a "flat" background, gesso under the gypsy image), Artcreations friday and more :)

Hope this was helpful, if you have further questions don't hesitate to ask. Thanks for looking and Happy Creating!!

Linda