That's Crafty!: Experimenting on Acrylic by Amanda Southern

Hi Everyone

That’s Crafty! are producing a wide variety of acrylic shapes, stacks, ATC’s etc, and I have to be honest I wasn’t convinced, I think the main reason of my dismissiveness was my own fear of the substrate and I didn’t really know how I was going to use them. As I love to embrace new products and techniques I took the plunge and having played now on this surface and made several pieces, which I’ll share in future posts, I am a complete convert! You can throw a myriad of products at these babies!!!

For this week’s post I have used a single acrylic ATC and been playing with image transfers onto the acrylic.

Here’s What I Did:-

Starting with an acrylic ATC I wanted to see if I could transfer onto it a picture that I had found in a magazine. I roughly cut the picture larger than the ATC, which is the silhouette girl on a pale blue background. I covered the image and the ATC with image transfer gel and then stuck them together brayering over to ensure that there were no air bubbles between the 2. I then left this overnight to fully dry. Once completely dry I then misted lightly with water and began rubbing off the paper so it left a translucent image behind, you have to be really gentle with this stage to ensure that you don’t completely remove the image or background colour. Then let it dry completely again.

Onto the front of the ATC I stamped the rain drops with black Stazon and coloured them from behind using coloured pencils. The pencils work as the thin layer remaining from the image transfer gives you a layer to be able to colour over and the pencil also maintains the translucency.

I then stamped a background onto thin white card with black Archival ink and then using gel medium stuck that to the back of the ATC again brayering over it to ensure no air bubbles. Once fully dried I trimmed off any excess card. To add some dimension I added Glossy Accents over the rain drops which gives a lovely dimension on the acrylic, sadly the photo doesn’t really pick this up. The final addition was to add the sentiment, I’ve rubbed over the acrylic with an anti static bag to ensure a clean stamping of the Versamark embossing ink which I then added pink embossing powder to, the embossed sentiment has also got a translucent look on the acrylic.

As a first attempt of image transfer on acrylic I am quite pleased with how it turned out. I think I might have to try transferring a photograph next and I will share my attempt with you all.