Creating Outside the Box

by guest blogger KathyAnne White

Expressing art in innovative ways drives my creative process. I am curious and love to play with new ideas to see what suits me. When discovering a new process, my nature is one of curiosity and experimentation.

 

 

I see possibilities and solutions and am not afraid to try new things and risk. Learning a process and creating with it over and over and over—until it aligns with my art—is natural to me.

Working with digital imaging is one of my favorite processes. For years I traveled and taught artists to digitally print on alternative surfaces. Students created images and produced substrates that would fit through an art printer. Then the artists used these techniques in their own way once returning to their studios. The drawback was that special printers were needed for this work.

I personally am intrigued with creating surfaces and artwork from digital prints. Working with metal sculpture I still wanted to use digital imaging, but the surfaces are 3D and would not fit through a printer. Once I started working with Transferieez™ (an image transfer medium) – magic happened. This product took the lid off what can be created with digital imagery. Now you can place digitals almost anywhere.

Here is a short list of ideas in placing image transfers – fired ceramics, all types of metal, burlap, cotton, silk, leather, mirror, wood, stone, sculpture, plastic, journals, books, tissue paper, thin Japanese paper, boxes, 3D objects, piano keys, walls, painted surfaces, the list goes on and on.

This piece also has some beads and wire attached over the transfer.

 

 

Use your imagination a bit and think about how you could use this to distinguish your art. It’s a pretty simple process once you get a look at how it works. You design your image and print it on transfer film, then you place it anywhere you would like.

For this sculpture in process you can see that I placed a transfer and then used Guilders Paste to blend into the surface altering the digital image.

 

 

For this piece of metal, I painted an abstract image in Painter and then printed that image. After the transfer was set on the metal it was scratched up a bit.

 

 

This is a detail of the side of a sculpture with a digital transfer and other elements.

 

 

Aluminum sculpture with digital transfer on the aluminum and on the zigzag copper in the center.

 

 

To view my actual process with Transferiez:

An instructional video for this article is posted on my YouTube channel. I also have step by step instructions and supplies on my KathyAnne White Studio Blog. Read it here: Enliven your Art with Digital Image Transfers.

Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.  Enjoy!!

 

Artist KathyAnne White is a mixed media artist whose work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. She frequently teaches workshops focusing on innovative strategies for digital printing alternative surfaces.

 

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