Gelli Arts FB Live - Image Transfers (resist technique)

[Music] and yes here we are hello hello and welcome probably you already know that today is about image transfers on the gel plate using magazine images so let me tell you a little bit about the image transfers i think it's about two years ago that i discovered this technique and it basically was by accident because i was doing some gel printing and um sometimes i just place a piece of paper a sheet of paper on top of the paper that i'm printing on if the paper i'm printing on is a little bit smaller than my gel plate just to make sure that my hands don't get dirty so one day i did that with a sheet of a magazine image and when i pulled up the image from the magazine i saw that some of the text from the image stayed behind on the gel plate so of course that was something that i got really excited about and so i tried um many different ways to find out the best way to do it and it's very tricky it's um it's not an easy technique um when you don't know how to do it so once you figured out how to do it it's not really that difficult but um it takes a lot of experimenting to find out how it works and it's really really hard to explain because there are so many um so many things that are involved to get good prints and that goes from the paper you print with but also the paper you print on it has to do with the the paint that you're using it has to do with how hard you rub on the paper it has to do with the temperature or the humidity in humidity in your room and so you really have to figure out what works best for you so i could tell you the magazines i tried in the netherlands that work and some of them are international magazines like folk or l or there are a couple more but it has to do with the way the magazine is printed and the paper that it's printed on so maybe i could tell you that folk is working for me but if you are in the u.s and you buy a vote there it might not work because maybe in the us it's printed with different ink or it's printed on different paper so it really um you really have to figure out for yourself what works but today i'm going to try and explain and show to you the the most important things you have to keep in mind and so i'm going to turn the camera around and then i'm going to show you as much as i can as much as possible so let me see let me switch the camera so here on my workspace i already have a couple of samples made with from different magazines and different with different colors of paint and ink and so i'm going to walk you through the uh the possibilities that there are at least a couple of them and then you have you have to experiment for yourself to see what works first of all let me say that this is such a tricky technique that uh i don't get good prints all the time either so i would say that maybe two out of four or two out of five prints um i get really excited about that are prints that i really really like and that i feel like they are worth going in my art journal and the other three are either a total failures or they are good enough to to become a background or to work on a little bit more but i can ensure you that today i will have some failures too and maybe that helps um for you that um to know that that it is a hard technique and that i don't have a hundred percent uh perfect prints all the time so you don't think that uh you know they work out all the time with me and why and what are you doing wrong sometimes you're not doing anything wrong but it's it's just not working and it's very hard to figure out what that is that makes that it that it doesn't work but for me personally i think the failures are worth the um the prints that turn out really nice because they are so exciting and so uh i so love the the way they look that that it's worth all the failures so that's first and what i'm going to do today is i'm going to show you both the different um ways to do it so the first thing that i found out was doing the prints with acrylic paint and then because it was so hard i i've tried to figure out other ways to do the technique and i came up with a technique where you use stazon in your first layer so that's a permanent stamping ink and you use stazon in your first layer and it's actually an easier technique than the than the one with the acrylic paint so i'm going to start with showing you some prints with text like these for instance because with text if your print is not turning out perfect they it will always still be something fun to use in the background um it doesn't have to be perfect if there are are pieces that you can't read or where uh some of the letters are missing it doesn't matter if it's going to be a mixed media crunchy background so when you start doing this technique it can be a good idea to first go for for text prints because um it it feels as if it's easier to do and and your results will be better and you are will be more encouraged encouraged to continue and go to the more difficult images so first i'm going to show you the technique with the stazon because that's an easier technique and i'm not really sure why it's it works better but in my experience the printing with the stazon in the first layer works with more different magazines i tried with the stays on i did prints with even newspaper and like really cheap brochures that came in the mail and um from very glossy magazine stock to the not so glossy magazines all of them kind of worked with the stazon although i have to say that the magazines that are a little bit more glossy work a little bit better than the ones that are not so glossy because the paper of the not so glossy magazine usually is more absorbent and so it's harder to leave ink behind on the plate so this is from um a brochure from klm and um i'm going to print some text and this little map here because it's uh it's just something where there's a lot of contrast that's also a reason why printing text works out really well a lot of times because usually your text is just black and white and that's the highest contrast you can get and to get good uh results with um image printing you really need a lot of contrast i noticed that the more contrast there is the better your prints will be and the reason i think i mean it's not um um i i have i had to figure it out myself because um no one had done it before so i think that the darker ink in the print is resisting the paint and the ink on the plate and the paper is actually absorbing the paint and the ink so in the darker areas in this case the text the magazine paper will not pick up the ink from the plate and leave it behind so you can make a second print pulling the the ink that's left behind from the plate to do the stazon technique i have seen people doing it without a second layer of paint that i'm about to add and you can totally do that but you will never get as crisp results as when you when you use the second layer that i'm about to apply so you can try that if you want to just add the ink put your paper on top and then pull a print i couldn't i can actually do that but i'm not going to do it with this print i'm going to take another one i'm going to do it and so you can see the the difference uh when i do the other one so here my ink is still wet and i'm placing my image on top and i'm rubbing and picking up my paper to see how much of the ink is absorbed by my image by my magazine paper and if there's still enough ink left behind so as you can see you can see clearly see that here's text and some photos and now i can go ahead and pull a print so and there we go so i'm pulling up the ink from the plate but as you can see there's still a lot of color also in the background so you do see the photos you do see that there is text and this can be um a pretty background if you want to work on it a little bit more but what i want is that what is was white in my magazine image that it's also white in my print or at least that the ink the blue ink that's still here in the background that that is gone so to get that i need another layer to pull the print so i'm just going to remove the ink that's left behind on the plate because otherwise it will pull up in my next print and then again it will not be a nice crisp and clean print so i'm also drying my plate because otherwise the ink gets too thin when the blade is still wet so i'm going to apply again the stays on and you need a nice even layer of stays on covering all of the plate but don't continue doing this for too long because when the ink starts to dry and you um continue dabbing you will just lift up the ink again instead of adding more to the plate so you have to do it quite fast and now this has to dry and um it takes a little while so i'm doing this with the stazon ink because that's the quickest drying ink on the gel plate you could totally do this with archival ink or the versafine ink but that dries way slower than the stazon and i'm not a very very patient person you might know that by now i'm not very patient and i don't like to wait for ink and paint to dry so that's why i use the stazon and besides that i always have really good results with the stays on so that's also a good reason so this needs to dry for a couple of minutes and of course i don't want to wait for it to dry so i did some preparation and i'm going to put this one aside for a later print and i have a smaller one here with the black stays on and you can totally use any color of stays on although i prefer the darker colors because they show up better in the prints but my favorites are the jet black and the midnight blue that i just applied to the to the previous plate but you can also get really nice results for instance if you take a hot pink or something and then pick up the print with uh with white paint you can also get really nice results so this one is dry already and how do i know that it's dry well first of all because it's been laying down there for about an hour and so it definitely has to be dry but you can also see that it's not shiny not really shiny anymore if it's still wet you can see when you turn it to the light that it has a shine that goes away when it's dry but also you will notice when you do this more often that you kind of know how much time you it needs to dry and that can also be different in your area than in my area so you have to figure that out so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to apply a layer of paint to the dried ink and i'm not going to apply it straight to the plate but i'm going to roll it out on a separate sheet of paper and that's because if my brayer touches the ink it will just lift up the ink from the plate the ink will just stick to my brayer i have to make sure that the brayer is completely covered with wet paint before i go over my gel plate so i'm going to roll out my paint on a separate sheet of paper and then apply it to the plate and now i'm going to put my image on top and i wrap lightly from the middle to the edges i don't want any air bubbles because if there are air bubbles [Music] you you will not pull up the um you will not pull up the ink in the areas where there are air bubbles so i'm carefully lifting up the paper to see how my transfer looks and it needs a little bit more rubbing here because it's not really picking up the ink here down here so i'm just putting it down again and rubbing some more so it looks as if i just added a little bit too much paint here because i don't know if you can see it maybe if i pull it up so here's still some white and that basically means that there was too much paint and for some reason my paint also looks a bit um as if there's as if it's really thin so maybe i should take another brand but at least you can see there has been some transfer and now i'm going to pull this print the same way as i would pull any dried paint from my plate so that means i'm adding a very thin layer of paint then putting my paper on top and then pull the ink from the plate so this is what i have now and as you can see it's not a perfect print especially not down here but i really kind of like this it it almost looks like it's an old very old map or something so i i don't know i either had too much paint here or too much ink i don't know what happened here but at but as you as i said my prints are also not always perfect but it depends on what you consider perfect right because this could for you could be a perfect print it depends on what you're looking for so let's try another one and maybe it also could be that if i had used a different magazine for this particular print that it would have turned out totally different because the paper of the magazine is different but i'm definitely going to get another white paint because this one looks a bit weird and let's make sure it's not the paint that's causing the problems so and then i have let's see if my the bigger one is dry already let me see it looks still a tiny little bit wet so just to be sure i'm going to take another one that i prepared and let's take some more text like this maybe and another fun thing to do is to combine text from different sheets with different sizes and then also include the torn edge in the print so let me get some more text and some smaller sex too i think that should be enough to cover this plate let me put this one aside and we can also use a different color we don't have to print with white so why don't we take a pale lemon for this one now i need to roll out again my paint on a different sheet of paper and then apply a thin a nice and thin layer and then i have again i have to be careful with the rubbing when i place my um magazine on top i have to be careful with the rubbing because this is a different magazine and it might need way less rubbing than the other one you have to figure that out too and it might be a good idea to write that down once you know how which magazine works very well and which needs a lot of rubbing and which one needs only a little bit of rubbing you could write that down so you know and you don't have to figure it out every time again when you start printing so let's just pull this away and see how this turned out so i think i have a little bit of i had a little bit of an air bubble here and i will show you when i pull the print um what's what happens when you have air bubbles but first let's pull this print so now i can just add the paint straight to the plate because um there's a little bit of paint on top of all the ink now and it's it's totally fine and again make sure i can't say it enough when you pull the print make your layer of paint as thin as possible because otherwise you will just pull up the top layer of paint and not the layer that's underneath on the plate okay and here we go okay so here's what happened air bubble air bubble and here i wrapped too much so there's not really sorry not really any text left but still i think a pretty cool print but let's do some um let's do a face let's do something that's very recognizable and let me show you how you can fix things for instance if you do a face you can fix you can fix sometimes things before you even pull the print i'm very sorry now let me find a good prince i have a whole bunch of um pages here and i'm going to look for one that has enough contrast as the contrast is very important because the more contrast there is in a picture the better the result will probably be um black and white pictures usually are the best but sometimes pictures like these also work very well so let's just try this one let's see if we can make this one work and now i suppose this one is dry enough [Music] let's try this one first we are going to add the layer of white paint again oh and i had a little bit of a a small area on my brayer that i had no paint i felt it when i put down my brayer on the plate that it's stuck to the plate here so i think there's a little area here where there's no ink left but we'll see so the hard thing when doing a live is that i can't go like really close to the plate with my head to see how it looks underneath the paper because then i would use would look at my hair all the time but i think this might actually turn out pretty well okay i don't want to do any more rubbing i don't want to you have to be careful because if you rub too much you might rub away eyes or nose or something and you don't want to rub away that but i can see that here and here i had air bubbles and they are in the face and i don't want them so what i can do is i can take my baby wipe or wet cloth and i can just gently wipe that away so i can clean it up a little bit wherever i want to i think maybe here and then of course you can also do a lot of work on the prints afterwards you can totally [Music] kind of remove areas that you don't like afterwards you can add to areas where something was lost using markers or pens or pencils that would all work but i you can pretty much see already that this might be a really nice print right so now we step one worked out great i have a nice transfer on the plate and then step two comes and step two is also scary because that's the one where you have to pull the print and you might add too much paint and not pull the perfect print even though you have a perfect transfer so it might still totally become a total failure even though i have a really nice transfer here but that's the risk you take when you um when you do this technique you have to be patient you have to be prepared to have failures and then every perfect print is just like an like uh it yeah it makes you feel really good if you have really nice prints so besides the white paint i'm also going to add a little bit of yellow so i'm kind of adding um another color to the print even before pulling the print of course i can go in there afterwards adding color uh with different products but i can also add color already in while i'm doing pulling the print so again careful i have to be careful with my paint i have a really nice layer and you should actually kind of see the print already shine through the paint then you know that your layer of paint is thin enough so i can already see her face paper and now rubbing oh i see somebody asking does it work with photos well it does you cannot put photo paper on the gel plate it will totally stick to the plate and never get off again so i would never do that i have seen people doing it with laser prints but i didn't have any really good results with laser prints unfortunately so i couldn't do it with my own look at this so this is why we do it this is why i do this technique because how cool is this i think this is really cool so here you see this little area there that's the little area where i said i felt that my brayer stuck to the plate and it took away the ink and i could have wrapped a little bit more because as you can see there are still a little bits of ink where i not necessarily wanted them but i can go in there with paint or markers or pencils or watercolor or whatever i want and clean that up if i want that but it's almost like an old movie like um i don't know a still from an old movie with the with the grain or something so um this is the technique with the ink and as i said this works with the majority of the magazines and and the brochures and whatever i tried i tried a lot of them and most of them worked with the with the ink technique but then there's also the technique where you use only paint and i'm also going to show you that one because it's it's a little bit different it's what i what i can say basically is that maybe when you use the ink you get more details like for instance here that you can see all the the hair all the details in the hair and even in the lips here and you can see the eyelashes so with paint usually it's a little bit less detailed but um yeah using paint is also fun so let's do let's do first one with text again and paint and then i'm going to do a picture also with paint and then i'm also going to show you some of my finished image transfers how i use them in my art journal and what you can do with them so this is the tricky one and this is the one where you have to figure out which paints works for you which with which magazine because that's also something i mean i this paint can could for instance work perfectly with my [Music] l magazine but would maybe totally not work with my folk magazine it doesn't make any sense there's no way you can predict what is going to work so just try all your different paints with your different magazines and write it down so what i did i will show you i'm just going to put this aside for a moment so what i did is i made all these different prints and i stapled them to the page that i took the print from and i wrote down what the magazine is and what the paint is that i used to pull the print so i have all these different um prints and i can just look at how how well they worked and which so i tried all the different magazines with all the different paints and all the different uh inks and um now i can see which paints work well with which magazine and which don't work so well so i have this whole stash of prints and dry outs but at least now i can just go through there and if i have a magazine i can look it up and i can see which paint is best to use with that magazine that makes life a lot more a lot easier okay so paint let's see so this is a winsor and newton and this is for me a new paint to do image transfers with so i haven't really tried it so let's see what happens so for this layer also don't make your layer too thick but um sometimes you have a magazine that you actually want to make your layer a little bit thicker because the paper is so absorbent that you can hardly put your paper on top of the plate and it's like soaking up all the paint and nothing is left behind on the plate other magazines might totally resist all of the paint and need a lot of rubbing to to actually soak up any of the paint so for those magazines you need a thinner layer it's complicated i know but it's worth figuring out how it works so look at this how easily this is going to absorb the paint and how crisp the [Music] the transfer is on the plate i can even see the really thin letters down here so and um here i had this little blob of paint that i didn't roll out really well so that stayed there it was not absorbed by the by the magazine paper so i'm just going to try very carefully to get rid of that and here's also little so this needed almost no rubbing i put the paper down and i just pushed it and that was it so as i said you have to uh place the paper down and kind of right away lift up a little bit of the paper to see how much how well that magazine is absorbing that specific paint so it looks to me that that the windsor and newton is very well absorbed by the paper and also is leaving a very nice and crisp image behind now this paint needs to dry because if i would put paint right away on top and start rolling i would just mix it with the paint on the plate and i would totally lose the image so i don't know how fast this paint dries but i would use paint that dries fast for this technique i would not use for instance golden open because this needs to dry and you will have to wait forever until an open paint is dry so it's better to use a paint that's drying rather quickly and i'm just carefully going to touch the paint to see if it's dry and it looks dry to me so now i'm going to add another layer of paint to pull the print and again i'm going to add some color too to create an interesting background and the paper um the paper i'm using by the way is um a heavy copier paper so it's a heavier than the than the regular printer paper but the regular printing printer paper is also really good for this technique but basically you can do it on any paper even on like oh i like this that's nice isn't it so you can even do it on book paper or music paper um let's do one more on book paper and then i'm going to show you how i use my prints in my art journal so let's take a sheet of or a book paper or let's do some music paper and let's find a nice photo put this fit on here i think it fits on there let's just try and i'm going to use on the same paint because it worked so well and i want this to work right now because you are watching although i'm not really sure if the contrast is enough in this photo because there are a lot of gray tones but there's only one way to find out right i'm going to place this on here and very lightly smooth out my print from the middle to the edges and checking if it needs any more rubbing so obviously here are more gray zones so there is staying more paint behind than it was before with the black and white text picture i'm not not so sure about this one i'm actually i don't think that this is a good one so i don't want to waste my music paper on that one i'm just going to print it on some copier paper and then i'm trying another one for the for the music paper and i was right this is not a good one this is like a real failure i can't even um i can't make anything of this i can't even fix this so this is one that goes well it doesn't have to go in the bin because i can of obviously print over it and make it a nice print but this is not a good transfer so let's try another one um how about i have one left here one prepared played with ink on the other hand it's already [Music] i only have 10 minutes left okay i think it's better if i show you now what you can do with your prints i mean i have showed the ways to uh to pull them and this is going to be recorded when i um when i end the live then it will be you can watch it as a recorded version and you can [Music] go back and see how i did the different prints and also there are two videos on the youtube uh channel jelly art youtube channel showing um that both techniques so there's one showing the technique with the acrylic paint and there's one showing the technique with the with the stays on so you can also go there and watch the div this two separate techniques so this is one print um a magazine print from l as you can see you can still see a little bit of letters and this was also not a perfect print but i just went in there with my watercolor markers no my watercolor pencils and i just call it a print and then for me this was good enough to go in my art journal on this colorful background um and here i have some so this one i made this afternoon and this one is made with the black stazon and i was so so happy when i pulled this print because i think this is really amazing so the text i wrote in there the writing i wrote in there afterwards with a black pen and i also i colored the lips and added some eye shadow and a little bit of color in the face so that's what i started but it's so this is not finished yet i can work on it and i can create an art journal page out of it and then put it in my journal and then i have another one that i put this afternoon that i was really happy with um here i don't know if you can see it but there's this line going from the top to the bottom this was also um where my brayer did not have enough paint all around and i kind of lifted up the ink before i pulled before i added the paint so there was not enough ink in this area to give a good transfer but i simply took a blue pencil and then i colored in this area that wasn't dark enough to make it stand out more but the one thing that came out perfectly in this print is the eye which is the most important part everything else you can fix but the eye if you do a face the eye is the most important part i think this i consider this and this a perfect print and let me see so here's another one that i pulled from a magazine and i did the same as i did here with the colors so i used a yellow a white and a pink to pull the print and the ink on the plate was the midnight blue stays on and the distressed edges you see here they are from leftover paint on the plate so i actually made this uh transfer on the dirty plate something like this so i use the plate that i had used before to print tags like i did on this plate as you can see and the leftover paint around the clean area picked up in my print and that created the distressed look around the edges with which i really really like and then here i have another one that wasn't really like a perfect print but i just went in there with pencils and added some color but even i i highlighted some of the i outlined some areas to make them stand out more so this is here you can see that a print doesn't have to be perfect to to create something nice with them and then here's another one um this one is even this had a little area here um that didn't pull or where there was no ink on the plate and it's a little bit weird light area there in the eye but i think that gives a certain feel to the to the image and i kind of like it let me see what color is the blue paint so the blue paint that did the really nice i suppose you mean the one that did the really nice text it's called prussian blue u from winter and newton this is mirrored but windsor and newton persian blue you then there are some questions about heat tools and air hair dryers and well it's not recommended the gel plate is made from a material that can actually melt when it gets too hot so it's not recommended doing that you should not add any heat to your to your gel plate can you lift your last print with watercolor paper yes you can um there's a but um if you have watercolor paper that is very textured then you will get little white areas in your print because in the lower areas the paper will not pick up the the paint from the plate so if that's okay with you if you like it it gets a little bit more distressed look and if you are okay with it you can do it and otherwise you have to make sure that you have a watercolor paper that has very little texture but you can totally print on watercolor paper i've done it a lot it's nice and sturdy so you can create nice books out of watercolor paper i see somebody asking if you can print your own your own photos and as i said before i have seen people doing image transfers with laser prints but then also it's a matter of the right paper that you print your photo on the right paper that you uh print on the right paint and i have not found a way to do image transfers with laser prints that is satisfying enough for me and that's basically i think because they are never like really perfect and if you pull um if you do image transfers with photos of people that you actually know then for me somehow they are not satisfying enough but you can you can totally try i mean it will not harm your your plate or anything so yeah just print some do some laser prints and and try um it will not work with um i don't think it will work well with inkjet prints because ink yet print is water soluble so probably when you place it on the plate the ink will start to run and you will not get like a really nice and crisp image than of can you use cardstock yes you can use cardstock but it's the same as with the watercolor paper if it has a lot of texture you will see it in your print and cardstock is usually quite absorbent so that doesn't matter for the final print that doesn't matter really it might be that you need a little bit more paint to pull the print but in general that would totally be possible to use cardstock okay okay well i think that's it for now i will go through the comments um probably tomorrow and see if there are any uh like important questions that i need to answer meanwhile you can just um also go to the youtube jelly art youtube channel and find the videos with these techniques and many many many other techniques that are worth trying i hope you enjoyed today and one more thing i want to say is that next week i will be live on the michael's website with the michael zoom class it's free you just have to sign up to be able to attend and you can find on the jelly arts blog the events calendar calendar where you can see when and what time um i will be live there and um that's it for now i wish you a wonderful day and i hope to see you again next time bye bye bye [Music] you

Channel: Birgit Koopsen

Views: 9,703

Keywords:

Id: kV0UjnRy1bA

Length: 58min 18sec (3498 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021