The technique is image transfer of designs or patterns from paper onto another medium, using a heat source such as a heat press or iron.

The materials I explored transferring onto included polyester satin cloth as well as plywood. What I learnt was that some kinds of transfer mediums like transfer ink and fabric crayon could be used on regular copier paper, while to transfer a printed image onto wood you needed a laser printer and the Magic Touch CPM 6.2 paper.

Different natural leaves and a bird feather were used to create different patterns, as seen above.

The Iron was used as a heat source to transfer the design from the paper to the polyester satin cloth. Firstly the paper with the image is placed face down on top of the polyester satin cloth, then covered with a sheet of baking paper. Next heat is applied with the iron.

It turned out that after the image was transferred to the cloth, the colours became lighter, brighter and more vivid. The right image above shows direct transfer printing and indirect transfer printing using the pattern made by thread.

Digital transfer printing is different, as the image needs to be printed onto the Magic Touch paper.

The original image file has darker and richer colours, and when transferred to plywood using heat press the colours became lighter and look abit washed out. The learning point here is that perhaps the heat press should be used for a longer period of time and the paper should be peeled slowly to check if the image has transferred over properly, as some of the image on the bottom left corner did not transfer to the wood. Perhaps an image with warmer colours should have been chosen as well to go better with the light tan colour of the wood.

Due to the blue theme, I decided to pair it with my resin butterflies.