Image Transfer - A Cool Art Technique

I first fell in love with the look of image transfer while reading about it in Somerset Studio magazine. The technique itself, though - despite reading numerous how-to articles in the magazine - escaped me. In the beginning people were using toxic substances such as acetone to dissolve the toner on copies. Or, to get a colored image they were using Polaroid pictures and expensive equipment. So although I admired the look I didn't use it.

A couple of years ago an artist friend of mine asked me just what an image transfer was. Googling to find the right information was so frustrating that I decided to create a lens as a sort of bibliography. Since then the lens has grown quite a bit and includes many different methods for image transfer as well as my own "faux" image transfer technique that I developed.

Check it out for yourself by clicking on this link: Image Transfer on Squidoo.

Image courtesy of "T" Altered Art on Flickr.

Altered Art Vintage Valentines

A couple of years ago, with the kind encouragement of a friend, I learned how to use Photoshop. There was a steep learning curve but then one day something just clicked and the other pieces of the Photoshop puzzle pretty much fell into place. Getting a Wacom Graphire Bluetooth 6 x 8-Inch Tablet for my computer helped immensely as well. In fact, that alone was life changing! Suddenly I was free to try all sorts of things artistically that I couldn't before.

About the same time people in the mixed media/paper arts world started using a lot of vintage 1920's era images of people in their work. I found Tallulah's online where I could download them for a reasonable price and use them commercially. Then I started playing around with digitally altering some flower photos I'd taken to turn them into backgrounds. Valentine's Day was coming up so I set a task for myself of creating several valentines from the formula I'd invented. That was the key moment in my learning of Photoshop. From there I created a Zazzle shop for them and now with the handy Zazzle module on Squidoo, a lens that is just the beginning of my altered art Valentine adventures.

Altered Art Vintage Valentines on Squidoo