I am very excited to be the proud owner of a BIG SHOT! Having never before owned a die cut machine, I am now a self proclaimed novice, and experimenting with interesting ways to use die cuts with our ART SQUARES.
This project was supposed to be an experiment using a die cut as a photo tansfer.
Choose two flower photos of different colors, but each with a large concentration of color over most of the photo. (We teach photo card classes and tell our students that a great place to take pictures like these is at your local garden center or farmers market) Scan or copy the photos and print out onto standard copy paper.
To create a play on the flower theme of the photos we used the Flower Silhouette die from Savvy Stamps. Punch out flowers from both photos.
As the first step in the 'photo transfer' process completely coat the top side of a white 3" square with Matte Perfect Paper Adhesive. Use a paint brush to paint the adhesive all the way off the edges and rinse the brush well afterwards.
Taking the cut out flowers, one at a time, set them photo side down in the wet adhesive. Gently brush more adhesive over the top of them and set aside to completely dry. (you can click on any of the photos to view them larger)
When is was completely dry, the plan had been to sand off the back side of the copy paper to 'reveal' the photo 'transferred' to the square. What a pleasant surprise to find that the adhesive had completely saturated the paper and made the color from the photo seep through in a really cool way.
As a result, it was time to take advantage of the surprise and create a color surround!
Another characteristic of the Perfect Paper Adhesive is that it is actually a liquid acrylic medium. By painting it all across the surface of the square you create a coating so the square is no longer absorbent. With that in mind it was time to use the FW Acrylic inks we had recently rediscovered.
The first effort of painting directly with a paintbrush just didn't look right and a quick swipe with a paper towel removed the brushstrokes. Another ah ha moment occurred when we discovered that the paper towel would actually be a perfect tool to apply the ink - it even left a bit of pattern from the surface texture of the paper towel.
A small plastic eggshell palette was perfect for drops of ink and blending, all the while dabbing these mixed colors onto the square with the corner of the paper towel. Just keep dabbing until you have a pleasing result!
(the card stock is our exclusive dark gray - available in packages of 12 folded cards)
Beautiful card! Love how your project turned out! Thanks for sharing.
Katie B.
Posted by: Katie B. | April 20, 2013 at 02:18 AM
What a great technique, Lisa, and beautiful card!
Posted by: Sharon Harnist | April 11, 2013 at 04:02 PM