Oil transfer prints

Penny Dullaghan has been a wealth of ideas in Sketchbook Skool this week. Another one of her printing techniques was oil transfer printing. It's the grown up version of the 'trace and transfer' technique you learn when you're a kid (trace something on tracing paper, shade on the backside of the paper with soft pencil then draw over your original lines to replicate the image. Another way to look at it is as grownup carbon paper. 

Memories of flight

I started off by blobbing some black oil paint onto thin white cartridge paper (even regular printer paper would be fine, I just didn't have any). Then I used a thick brush to wash thinners over the paint, creating a black piece of paper. This was the stinky bit. I left it to dry- Penny recommends using a hairdryer to achieve this but I don't own one of those either, so I left it to fate and set off to draw my image. I'd made a wash of purples and blues on watercolour paper and so decided to use that as my first attempt. Our theme was flight- I got thinking about all the flightless birds that have evolved here in New Zealand, and wondered if they get any wistful pangs when they see other creatures flitting by on the breeze. And what about things that aren't even meant to fly? I drafted my image on another piece of paper, taped the transfer paper over the dry watercolour wash and taped my sketch over the top. Then I took a very sharp, hard pencil and traced. 

It was straightforward, and by only taping one side I was able to take peeks at what was going on. The oils transferred easily, with an expressive line. Even the pressure of my hand resting on the paper was enough to get smudges. When I was happy with the detail that had transferred over, I removed the tape and used some acrylic inks and acrylic paint to add some more colour and lift the design a bit. 

​You can see how the dryer areas of the transfer paper gave a thinner, finer line whilst the wet areas gave some thick, expressive detail which worked well on the watercolour paper. Some of the oils also showed the grain of the watercolour paper, which I quite like here(I assume this is where my hand rested on it). 

Next up I tried (yes, you guessed it) a dinosaur. 

A little bit of drying time and a wash of watercolour perked him up nicely. I like the line quality and the speckles on the image, though I wouldn't mind cleaning up the grubby background (I may have to brave Photoshop!)

Plesiosaur in the bath, oil transfer with watercolour

The transfer paper was good to go for a third attempt. I didn't preplan this one- and soon discovered that the lightest pencil touch would get printed! The lack of planning shows, and I think the oil transfer overwhelms all the tiny details. Note to self- plan a bit more next time!

It would be interesting to try oil transfer printing over a bright, bold image or stencil. It's also got me thinking about going back in time by a couple of decades and attempting monoprints again.