Image Transfer - Just when you think you know what's what. . .

I have been transferring images onto Polymer Clay for a couple of years now, so you would have thought that I would have it all sorted and under my belt and fully figured out etc etc. But I am still plagued by inconsistencies.
The issue is stickiness.
Once an image has been transferred, and all the paper has been rubbed off using the time honoured 'water and index finger' method, the image on the clay becomes sticky and is likely to smudge and transfer itself onto your fingers, however careful you are.
It's fine if you are making flat objects, like my tile beads, you just have to know when to stop rubbing the last tiny bits of paper off, knowledge that comes with experience, but if you are hoping to wrap the piece of clay with the image on round something, you are in trouble. Obviously, you can't wrap something round something else without touching the surface, however briefly, and when you do that, smudges and suchlike happen. And, as I like to wrap my images round things, this affects me.
My style has evolved to take account of that. In fact I have managed to make it work as a kind of faux ageing process, along with other tricks and processes. So it has become part of what I do and a step in the evolution of my style. However, I would like to find a way of stopping it happening for the times when I am not after that effect.

And. . . I thought I had. I have tried gently heating the image transferred clay to help the image to 'dry'. it doesn't. I have tried leaving it for a day or two. Nope, still sticky. I tried freezing it. Nope. I tried a thin layer of that floor polish stuff I can't remember the name of, and I thought that had worked, because it seemed to have done, but there was another issue I hadn't thought much about that has rendered all my experimenting kind of redundant. . .
Basically, I think a lot depends on the kind and brand of paper and ink involved. It has to be a photocopy/laser print, which I get from my local copy shop. I get things printed on an irregular basis, so if they change the brand of paper or toner, I wouldn't know. Sometimes I use the photocopier at the local library, which would use their particular paper and toner brand.
I have come to this conclusion because I can't explain the inconstancies I get any other way.
I have been messing around with some printed images from different times and places, and mostly they come out sticky. But some are fine. I hadn't noticed because I assumed that the Klear (I think that's what it's called now I remember) floor polish coating was the reason for this. But I don't think it was. . . Sigh. . .
I need to do some experimenting. It may be that coating the image a thin layer of something does actually help a bit in some cases. It may be that if I coat the image immediately it is possible it might stop the stickiness from happening. I haven't tried prolonged soaking to get the paper off, but I can't see why that would be any better.
Meanwhile, I have been following my fascination with distressed surfaces by not fiddling around trying to get a clean result, but going with the smudging and smearing and making some very organic, rustic, ancient looking beads. Everything leads to something else you may not have considered. . . That's my excuse anyway.
Jon x

Bees down the Chimney, and Image Transfer Fun

I have known for a month or two that there was some sort of bee/wasp activity up at the top of our chimney stack. You can see them weaving about in that particular way they have when coming in to land, as it were. About ten or twenty weaving around at any one time. I was hoping it wasn't wasps, as they would make their presence felt around the fruit trees and around our outside dining table a bit too much. And that many wasps coming and going would mean a very big nest. As we were relatively undisturbed by wasps I guessed it was bees. No problem, I like bees. They don't bother us and we don't bother them. Live and let live etc etc.
So I didn't put two and two together when for the past four or five mornings I have found six or seven, very soporific and sad bees in our living room, crawling around the french windows to the garden. I was puzzled. I couldn't work out how they would have got in from outside as they weren't there when I shut the doors up at night. I couldn't locate anywhere in the floor or wall or skirting board etc where they might have come from. Odd. . .
Then my wife heard a faint buzzing coming from the wood burner. Mystery solved. . .
Our chimney is lined. It has a metal tube all the way down it which ends in the back of the wood burner, which is not in use yet and the doors firmly shut. The rest of the chimney space is filled with that insulating foam stuff (I think). I guess one or two bees fly into the top of the tube and fly or fall down all the way to the back or wood burner. From there they manage to find a way out and make a break for the french windows. Not sure what bees do in the winter, but I won't open that door until the weather gets colder just in case.
We should try to dissuade them from nesting up there really. Not least because we need some remedial work done on the flashing round that particular chimney stack, and I don't think a roofer would want to risk disturbing them. I shall consult our friend who keeps bees, he will have some advice I hope.

Anyway, bee issues aside, I have been forging ahead on the bead front. Trying to get image transfers to stop being sticky for long enough to handle them without smudging and getting the ink transferring to my fingers. . . I think I have solved it. I managed to wrap images round a round bead without smudging. Seams were another issue, but there are ways round them too, which I am exploring. I want to make a short tutorial on image transfers and what to do with them. Or at least take you through what I do with them to get the look I get. If I mention it here I might feel honour bound to actually do it. . . ;-)

So I have made a series of image transfer tube beads using somewhat more complex and random digital images of mine. They have turned out quite nicely, allowing that the relative neatness takes some getting used to for me. Never fear, the compulsion to grunge things up is never far away. I just want to know how neat the process can be. That gives me options. I like options. . .
'til next time,
Jon x

Instinct and Round Numbers

Well I've been kind of busy this last week or two, making stuff and generally following the proverbial fascination, like I do, but with a specific aim in mind. I wanted to have 300 items available in my Etsy shop. A bit of an arbitrary figure I know, but a nice, round one. And anyway, it's quite useful to have a target. Helps the motivation.

It started off well, in as far as not selling very much, therefore enabling me to build up the numbers can be called starting well. . . Then at the end of Feb, and through the first ten days or so of March I sold a whole bunch of stuff, which was great, but dented my intention to get to 300. (If indeed you can dent an intention. Whatever. You know what I mean.) Undeterred, I plugged away, making stuff and listing it, and eventually, despite people insisting on buying things, I got to 300! I also got to 300 sales at about the same time, so cause for double celebration.

I'm not sure whether having over 300 items makes the shop somewhat hard to find specific items in and hard to navigate generally. A lot of supply shops have more than that but I'm not a bulk supply shop. Oh well, I guess if someone is interested enough they will trawl through the goods until they find what they want. after all, it's all wonderful stuff. . .

As you can see, this fascination following I have been doing has been quite productive. I haven't prevaricated. I have been letting my instinct guide me and just got on with it. 

For instance, I had been meaning to try my tile beads in actual bona fide, proper square metal bezels, to see how they would look, so I bought a few. I had a tile bead or two hanging a round so I sanded the corners off a bit and stuck it in a bezel. Very nice.

But a couple of blank baked poly clay squares caught my eye and I tried another thing I had been meaning to try for a while. Which was using PVA as a resist. So I painted a simple design on the poly clay square with PVA, let it dry, or rather blasted it with a heat gun as I was impatient, and the heat gun was within arms reach, then painted some indigo alcohol ink onto it. Once that had dried, all I needed to do was peel the PVA off. Only it didn't want to peel off. I picked it off with a finger nail and it had worked fine, the simple design was left white. So I put some more PVA on and painted with a different colour, dried it, picked it off and the result was a rather cool, vibrant coloured, kind of abstract expressionist poly clay square. So I sanded the corners a bit, polished it up and stuck it in a bezel. I also grunged up the bezels with Alc ink and gilder's wax etc, as they were a bit boring left blank, and I wanted to make them 'my' bezels. Not everyone's cup of tea but I like it. A lot actually.

Trusting your instinct is a good habit to try to adopt I think, as when it works, it encourages you to have faith in your creative powers. When it doesn't work you can comfort yourself with the thought that you had the courage to step outside your comfort zone, and each time you do, you learn something useful that staying on the well trodden path wouldn't have taught you.

People go on about knowing when to stop, in the creative process. I think the converse is equally important. Knowing when to carry on, when to keep going and find that flash of inspiration that can turn a seeming disaster into a work of art. Learning from your mistakes and then turning them round. Persistence it's called.

So, encouraged by my success at poly clay squares in bezel making, I used up some more tiles I had knocking around, and worked up some more blank squares into interesting abstracts, either by painting as before, or engraving a simple design and scratching and sanding the hell out of it, selectively. It was fun. I have even made them into simple pendants by sticking each of them on a chain and making a simple clasp. I have put them up in my shop, so we shall see what the consensus from potential buyers is on them.
I was going to write about the other stuff I have been making in my journey to my nice round number but that would have meant an unfeasibly long blog post, and a bunch of bored readers. So I shall bore you with it next time.
J x

Image Transfer - part 324. . .

I'm still obsessed with image transfer stuff, and, though I say it myself as shouldn't, I have got it down pretty well by now.

Here's some I made earlier. .  Claire Maunsell gradauted cutters technique,  hollow beads. A repeat order no less ;-) Relatively gently 'antiqued' this time.

I have an idea of what works and what doesn't, which leaves me free to make various different sorts of beads, and to consider the different uses I could put the resulting beads to, instead of having to concentrate on the technique. . .

For instance, these are some 1.5 cm square, about 1cm thick, hollow, asymmetrical pattern, image beads I made because I liked the 3cm ones and thought smaller, chunky beads might look cool. Not sure what they would be best suited to, but necklace/pendant/assemblage beads looks the best option I think.

I can't stop making cufflinks. Even though I haven't sold many. They just look so cool! 

I am resisting the idea that a pair of cufflinks should match exactly. These, and all my other pairs, have similar, but not identical designs on them.

Some of the beads I made, that might have become cufflinks if I hadn't got a grip on my cufflink obsession, I made into earrings.

I have to stop making those soon too, or I will be overrun with them ;-)

Next, I going to try Tie tacks, I got some blanks the other day. Rings, if I can successfully mess up the horribly shiny ring blanks I got. I have sandpaper and alcohol inks etc, so I don't see it being a problem. . . And brooches, once I have researched what kind of pins and brooches other artists make, to get an idea of the scope of the 'medium'.
Should be fun ;-)
Jon x

Surface treatment - When does 'Distressed' become 'Messed up'?

Is there actually a dividing line? I am really enjoying seeing how close to total irreparable messed-up-ness I can take my image transfer bead 'ageing' process. It's a learning curve, and once you have taken a process too far, you can take a more informed view on how far to take it the next time.

Here's how things start out. Images transferred onto poly clay squares, in this case, using dye sub paper and kato trans liquid. This shot is after baking, obviously. You get a slightly fuzzy, out of focus effect, and some randomly dodgy edges. All of which is fine, as it all adds to the finished look. Neatness can be achieved with more care, if neatness is your thing.

Here's a shot of my desk with some of the above as finished beads, after the 'distressing' or 'messing up', (whichever it is deemed to be) process.

A closer view of the greeny brown ones. Sanded quite hard, as scratching Kato clear is not as easy as plain baked clay. Also, the scratches aren't visible until some darker ink/paint/whatever is applied and encouraged to sink into them.

This is what happens when the process is taken a bit further. These beads are slightly different in that the image trans process was the more usual one using a laser copy/print and water on plain white clay, or a 10% kato trans, 90% white poly clay mix. (Images 'stick' better with a bit of trans clay in the mix).

As there is no liquid clay involved, the surface scratches and distresses more easily. The image comes out sharper than the dye sub ones too. The other thing that happens with this method is that when Renaissance Wax is used at the end of the process, and rubbed in, it starts to dissolve the image. If you apply it carefully and leave it to dry for half an hour or so, it will buff up without too much of the image disappearing, but if you rub it in hard and buff up after a couple of minutes a fair bit of the image is removed. I like both effects. The top left bead has almost entirely lost the image, but looks cool all the same. imho.

These next ones are where it gets close to or over the dividing line between 'distressed' and 'messed up' that I am wittering on about. I like the kind of 'ghost image' of the pattern in red that gets left on the two on the right. This technique does make me wonder whether I should make some beads with no image on them at all, just madly messed up surfaces. I like the look, and losing the image, as in the bottom left bead, doesn't detract from it's coolness all that much. But overall, the ones where the image is still reasonably discernible are my favourites. How 'bout you?

An Experiment. . . .

Glass coasters from my Etsy shop

As you may or may not be aware, I have been making and selling framed tiles and glass coasters of my digital designs for a while now. To do this I use a process known as Dye Sublimation to transfer the

printed images onto the tiles or coasters. This involves using heat and pressure via a special heat press, specially coated tiles etc, and special printer paper and inks.

OK, Dye sublimation likes certain kinds of plastics and I was pretty sure that Polymer clay was likely to take a dye sub image pretty well. 

I decided to experiment as I had my specially set up printer and loads of paper, so I printed out a sheet of small images to mess around with. 

What I decided to do was use a disk of unbaked clay to apply the image to, but put a thin coating of liquid clay onto the image so that it stuck to the image and to the clay. The reason I wanted to stick the image to the clay was that I was intending to use a heat gun to 'bake' the liquid clay and transfer the image to it. If the image wasn't stuck down it would end up getting blown away. (I'm too impatient to bake them in the oven, and I wanted to do one at a time to see the results quicker)

So I tried that. I gave the image about one minute with the heat gun on medium. ( my heat gun has a heat intensity dial, which is very useful - Wickes sell that model ) I was careful not to burn it. The image became visible through the paper quite quickly but I kept heating it just to be sure it had transferred. 

I then wetted the back of the image and rubbed the paper off. You can soak it in a bowl of water if you wish, same difference. The clay disks weren't properly baked so I baked them in the oven for about 15 mins or so to cure the clay. The results were very clean and clear.

More or less un-messed with image transfer disks. Just a bot of Alcohol ink round the rim.

Too clean and clear for me ;-) having established that my method worked I decided to get stuck into some surface treatment on some of them. I tried my usual various combinations of alcohol inks, inca gold and gilder's wax in various colours, sanding it off a bit and then adding more, and so on and so on.

They looked nice, but there was no way of stringing them if I wanted to use them, so I made them into the front layer of some circular hollow beads, using the Claire Maunsell method with different sized cutters. This of course required the whole thing to be baked. . .

The trouble was that baking would melt the gilder's wax and disperse or otherwise mess up the alcohol inks intensity. Oh well, couldn't be helped. They came out solidly baked but a bit muzzy and fuzzy. So I used the same alcohol inks that I was painting the back and sides with to paint round the 'frame' of the front image. The resulting beads looked seriously beat up but cool all the same. Like something dug up from some archaeological site, on another planet. . . Which is fine by me.

But not as beat up as my attempts at transferring black and white images onto already baked clay disks. The image didn't stick to the clay as nicely as with raw clay and kept peeling off in an annoying way. I used some 'heat tape' that I use for dye sub stuff to hold it down but that wasn't always successful. I did the same as the beads above, giving them the surface treatment, then deciding to make them into usable beads by sticking another disk of clay behind them and then baking.

These ones look like they've been dug up from an ancient site, thrown off a cliff and then run over repeatedly by a chieftain tank. I like them though.

Next time I shall do things in the right order, but I shall still go for the messed up look ;-)
I might even do a proper tutorial in due course.
Jon x

Cheap prints!

I extended my price realism still further - to my Tiles and Coasters shop. I have had abstract prints for sale on there for a fair few months now and though they have accumulated a fair number of faves and views, none have sold.

This is a shame, so, in the spirit of 'realism' referred to earlier, I have knocked the prices down by about 40%. This may result in nothing whatever changing, but at least I will know that it isn't the price that is putting people off buying.
Jon x

Black and White

 

It occurred to me while messing around with my Image transfer stuff, that a simple black and white image might look striking and graphic on a tube bead or two. While pondering this I remembered the images I have been using to make the negatives for my Photopolymer texture sheets, which were conveniently black and white and available. I got some examples printed off at the local copy shop and tried some out.

I thought they came out pretty well. The rounded pattern looked a bit like those African eye beads you see around, but nicely different. I tried some chunkier beads than my usual. I'll try some hollow ones at some point I think, that way they would be lighter.

I still have to work out how they should be presented on a pendant or necklace and what beads they might go with, but I'll mess around until something clicks.

cheers,
Jon x

Image Transfer - more musings

Having been somewhat obsessed with rolling my image mapped bits of clay round tube beads, I decided to change focus for a bit and try using the flat images as just that, flat images. As the designs suggest tiles, and were initially created to echo tile designs in the real world I made what you might call tile beads with them.
I used a technique that Claire Maunsell shared a while back, for making hollow beads using cutters of different sizes, to construct a few square, hollow, double sided tile beads.

Basically, you transfer a couple of images using the water and index finger attrition method described in my previous post, making sure the image is slightly smaller than the larger of your two cutters.Then you cut out a couple of blank squares the same thickness as your image trans squares. Then, taking the smaller cutter, chop out the middle of the two (or more if you want a thicker bead) blank squares. Make sure your image squares are dry and not going to smudge ( I put a coat of Klear floor polish on them ) put the first one face down on your work surface, stack the two blank squares with the centres chopped out on top and finish off with the second image square face up. Gently push together without squashing or distorting.

Make a hole about 3/4 of the way up what will be the vertical side of your bead when strung, on both sides in order to allow string/thong to be threaded through, poke a barbq skewer or suchlike mandrel through the holes to suspend the bead on whatever kind of rack you use when baking, then bake. . .
Being me I had to mess around with them after baking. I painted the sides with alcohol ink and then gently sanded the top and bottom where the ink had encroached onto those surfaces. As they had been varnished and fired the sanding didn't erode the images as long as I was careful, but did take away some of the ink, giving a nice, faux ancient effect.
I'm really pleased with how they turned out and am going to mess around some more with this technique, when I get some time. . .
cheers,
Jon x

Image transfer musings

I've spent a fair few hours wrestling with various forms of image transfer onto Polymer Clay over the past few months. I have various (hundreds. . . ) of cool images that I created digitally by various means, that I have wanted to get off the computer and onto any substrate that will take them. Getting them onto Polymer Clay seemed an interesting challenge.
My explorations so far have been aimed at trying to get images onto raw clay that I could then manipulate by wrapping them round things. Most of the brighter and crisper ways of transferring images all seemed to involve baking the clay, or blasting liquid clay with a heat gun. OK in their way but you are left with a stiff, flat thing that is unwrappable.
The only way I found to transfer onto raw clay was the one that Donna Kato mentions in her book on Creative Surface Effects. It involves using a laser print, (it doesn't work with inkjets) and water. Several people have Youtube vids of this technique too. Basically you place the image face down on a bit of clay, rub/burnish the back of it to make sure the image is in good contact with the clay surface, then, using water and your index finger, rub gently-ish until the paper rubs off. This leaves you with the image that was once on the paper, now imprinted on the surface of the clay. There are various subtleties to it but in a nutshell, that's what you do.
What I then tried was to wrap that image around a pre-made tube bead, either baked or unbaked. The problem I encountered was that the image stuck to my fingers and smudged badly. OK, I tried hardly touching the image when wrapping, but that was very hard to do as some pressure and guidance is needed to get the wrap at the right angle etc.
I tried this technique with trans clay. The image stuck to the clay better, and much less to my fingers, but the resultant image looked a bit faded and dull somehow.

Early experiments

So I thought a bit and decided to try a mix of trans and white clay, white for the image quality and trans for the relative handleability. I tried about 80% white to 20% trans. This was better and I got some reasonable results, with the caveat that I wasn't going for anything pristine, I liked the wonky, cheap transfer/ancient artifact/rustic vibe I was getting, I just didn't want smudged images.
On a whim I tried something out. .  I figured that what I needed was something in between the image and my fingers that would protect it from smudging when being handled, so I tried a thin coat of Klear floor polish brushed on. This worked OK up to a point. . .
The issue with the basic laser print/water technique is that when left, over time the ink gets stickier and the clay gets stiffer and likely to crack when being wrapped. Putting a thin layer of weak varnish on helps with the first problem, but not so much with the latter, you have to try to judge when the varnish is dry enough to handle but that it hasn't dried to the extent that it will crack when wrapped.
I have had some success with this but still have to handle it as little as I can as the act of wrapping seems to re awaken the stickiness somehow. It's also not consistent enough for me to draw firm conclusions about what I am doing. I feel it sort of works, most of the time ;-)
Any of you found better methods?
Jon x

Sold Something. . .

At a local art show. I entered a few of my framed, printed tiles in a 'Well why not?' sort of mood, and when I turned up today to pick up my work, was agreeably surprised to find that I had sold one of my special 3 -tiles-in-a-frame ones. One of my seemingly Art Nouveau derived ones.

Though the 'Art Nouveau' is actually no such thing. The shapes in my tile design that echo that famous art movement being a product of complex fractal mathematics, a finely honed skill set, experience and a creative mind that Follows the Fascination where it leads. . . I found the resemblance during my digital explorations, and pursued it ;-)

I'm glad somebody liked them enough to buy them. I like them, but I don't really count. It also shows that I finally may have the pricing about right. £75. I didn't have time to photograph them before I put them in the show but here is a quick Pshop mock-up. I shall make some more of that design. And I think I shall try a 3 tiler or two in my tiles and coasters Etsy shop.
Onwards and upwards. . . ;-)

More Texture sheet stuff

These are some discs I made to show off the textures I made with my photopolymer stampmaker kit. Not sure what to do with them as I am not any kind of jeweller. I see people making inspiring necklaces, pendants and other assemblages, but haven't yet put my toe in that particular water. It's the making and experimenting I like. It will be a bit of a learning curve. But if you don't try you don't learn, I need to give it a go. Any tips? ;-)

Sold a set of these on Etsy - Really pleased. . .

Sold a set of these glass coasters to somebody in Australia. They must like them if they are prepared to pay postage for 4 glass coasters to the other side of the world. And so they should like them, they are beautiful ;-)

my Etsy shop