29) Family Portrait

Family portrait. Acrylic mediums and image transfers. 2009

Acrylic, acrylic mediums and ink on board.

By this point, we were learning all about acrylic mediums, their properties and how we can use them to make our paintings look better.

"Acrylic medium is basically the same as acrylic paint without the pigment. We can use it as paint additive, an adhesive, and a texturizer, and it can also be used to create image transfers. It comes in three basic weights (medium, gel, and paste) and two finishes (matter and gloss)."

I loved the idea of the image transfers and i started testing it on my own during my free time. There are several ways of transferring an image using acrylic medium, and after trying several of them i found that the one i feel more comfortable with was using the matte medium.

Basically what i had to do was print the image that i wanted to transfer in a normal paper and using a brush, i added the matte medium on the top of the picture, waited for it to dry and added another layer. I did this process about 3 times until there was enough medium on the picture. After i was sure that the medium was all dry, i put the picture in water for a couple of minutes so that the paper would get soft and be easy to remove. Right after taking the picture off the water, i started removing the paper from the back by gently rubbing my fingers on the surface in circular motion. What it does is that the ink gets stuck in the medium, so that when i removed the paper from the back i had a piece of transparent medium with the portrait of my family, which i afterwards pasted on the canvas. This is very useful because not only it looks more artistic, but also we can paint and add colors to the image ourselves without worrying that it might tear or that it might loose its color.

When i started working on this piece, i had no idea that it was going to turn out to be something nice that i would once hang on my wall because the reason why i did it was just for practice and experimenting. I really wanted to try the image transfer and i had also recently bought lots of textured mediums that i wanted to try and see what they were used for. So while i was simply experimenting i realized that what i had done was pretty cool, so i took it with me to Peru, framed it, and now its hangs on my parent's house wall. (I love it)

The writing at the top is a lovely poem for my family that i found at the time and i just loved it, so even thought it's written horizontally, and many people might get neck problems trying to read it, the meaning is still there and i think it look more artistic and creative.