I am experimenting with photo techniques such as transferring a photo image on to a wooden cradle board with several layers of wax underneath and then applying several more layers of wax medium over it. The aesthetic point being to enhance the colors and textures within the photo.
As you can see in photo #1, my photo transfer skills are not making headlines and only leave parts of the original image. I am one who actually prefers partial transfers but this is doesn’t even qualify as “partial”.
I learned from one of Linda Robertson’s videos that if I had warmed the wax on the substrate a bit more before applying the transfer and burnished with more detail pressure, the transfer might have been more successful. She also burnishes with a the edge of the spoon at a 45º angle, almost like scraping at it. She also demonstrated a wide variety of transfer papers and that may also be the future question to ask: which transfer paper would serve the particular image better? If it has darker colors, certain papers don’t work as well, for example.
And, the best advice, I think she gave to me, was take your time with transfers. In most cases of transfers that are not working, speed is a factor. In fact, she said, almost all encaustic pieces benefit from slowing down. Also, if you want the entire image on to the wax why not collage it in rather than transferring it?
But, what I think I learned from this failed transfer was that the original photo mounted on the board would have worked just as well. It was textured and colored in its original state and even the properly transferred bits on the board did not enhance the original.
One reason this is a critical question for me to ask is that burnishing properly and taking time to do it, takes shoulders of a fullback. So, is it worth this effort for each photograph I’m considering? That is going to be my future question as well.
I decided, “Ok, rather than print another regular print, I’ll print out the image on tissue paper and cover the transfer and we’ll be good to go.”
That would be image #2. The print turned out to be a bit muted and dreamy but I actually liked the effect and knew I could enhance the colors later with oil pastels or oil sticks.
Image #3 shows the image after wax medium has been applied. The tissue paper crinkled in ways I’d not seen when it was laid out and seemed to have a mind of its own when it came to my “smoothing” techniques. Since the partial transfer does not qualify as a smooth substrate, I made problems for myself by disregarding that rule! Embedding tissue paper on to an uneven surface brings trouble. No doubt, I could heat it up again and try to smooth it out, but heating tissue paper has its tolerance of “heat” manipulations as well and I think the evil-doer is really the substrate below!
So, I know this process is mastered by others and I’ll continue to try and learn the best papers and procedures to do the transfers but, for now, I think this original photograph is best aesthetically served by a tissue print without the wax!
I photographed the tissue paper print resting over the partial transfer and photographed that. Then I did some digital enhancements and ended up with something I may like better than my original photograph. The next step is to do another tissue print and embed that directly into waxed substrate (without the transfer) and adding wax and pigment to that to see if it adds something to the original Photoshop version.
Stay tuned. There’s still hope that encaustic can enhance the image, but in the case of this image, photo transfer is not worth the effort or expense of materials.
