Obsession 2014

For quite some time now my students and I have been working on different ways to transfer photographs to other surfaces.  Our biggest success has been with polymer transfers, and we have unraveled many of the secrets of how to make those transfers work(most of the time).  Lately, we have been working with DASS transfers, the brain child of Bonnie Pierce Lhotka http://www.digitalartstudioseminars.com/store/page3.html     With care, those transfers are consistently rich and full, but can be finicky and require using Lhotka's transfer paper and "Super Sauce".  Most recently, I have been experimenting with ink jet transparency transfers. 

After a few weeks of trying different ways of making the transfers, and most of them working only some of the time and not very well, I turned to youtube, and found clips on how to do the transfers(Gary's here has over 160,000 hits  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnF1WpxMsBs  ).I watched all that I could find, and was appalled at their sloppy techniques.  "No problem", I thought to myself, "I teach this stuff". So, back to the studio, armed with lots of knowledge and ideas of why things weren't working.  One woman had said in her demo, "Don't be cheap about applying lots of the glue!", so I knew to load up my brush with the "glue".  Days later, I wasn't much better off, except that I knew what would happen if I used too much of the polymer medium, and what would happen if I was stingy with it.  I tried regular brushes, foam brushes, and even my fingers(sloppy technique!) to apply the medium.  Still bad. Always something lifting or smooshing or disappearing, but with tantalizing bits and pieces of it working perfectly.  I kept working.  One night I dreamed that I was doing full body transfers of people.  They worked just fine in my dreams.

 

 The images piled up.  Sometimes they almost worked. Sometimes they were a complete and total failure.  Days went by. I kept working.  But the interesting thing that happened was that when I would first pull off a transfer, and realize that once again, it hadn't really worked, I would be disappointed. However, later that day or the next, I would come back, look at the image and find that I liked what I was getting, or perhaps, better said, what was happening that I didn't have much control over.

One night, I thought, why not just put make the layers in photoshop and then put the pieces of paper through my printer and get the image in a 100% true and faithful way, so I did:

 But what I decided was that I preferred the rough, hand made quality of the image, rather than the smooth perfection of the inkjet print print

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I'm not sure where I stand with all of this.  I have never really used any of these transfer processes in my own images, but at this point I have 50 of these transfers.  I'm just going to try a few more.  I'm thinking if I use canvas for the ground and load my brush fairly heavily but not too much......