Card for February MMCC: Girl with red flowers

Hi!

It's first of Febuary which means that it's time for a new Mixed Media Challenge!

February is a month of friends, loved ones, hearts and warm thoughts, so our MMCC is following that theme:

First I thought of making something with red hearts, but then I came across this amazing web site filled with beautifully altered digital items and inspirational free printables. I laser printed some of the images with the idea to use them for an image transfer project.

Image transfer with gel medium is a pretty easy technique, but for some reason I have not had too much luck with it. Getting a nice end result was difficult! Sometimes parts of the images came off, and sometimes I was not able to remove the last paper layer despite of proper rubbing. For those reasons I did not consider image transfer as one of my favourite techniques.

Well, that had to change.

The printed girl with the flower blouse was a perfect mix of vintage and modern, and I decided to transfer her on a card front. Her red flower inspired me to making this card:

This is how it was made:

First I fuzzy cut the printed image around the edges. Then I placed it face down on a post-it note (image transfer is done placing the image printed side down) and traced around the edges. I fuzzy cut the mask, too, and placed it on the card front.

Then I made a copule of additional post-it note masks, but this time using my Stampendous flower stamp. A mask allowes you to layer stamped images as the mask protects the already stamped images from getting re-stamped.
After filling the background with stamped flowers my card looked like this:

The background cardstock was of mixed media quality paper, so I had really hard time with choosing a media for colouring the flowers. There were too many options! I wanted the flowers to have rich and vibrant colours, so I chose my Promarkers for the task; first just simply colouring over the flowers, and then adding some shading with darker red/brown tones.
Another reason for using alcohol based markers was the fact that they would not react with water, so they were a safe choise considering the following steps.

When the flowers were coloured I glued down the image with thin and fluid glossy gel medium. The ideal type of gel medium would have been fluid matte one, but my matte gel mediums were too thick for this purpose. Even though some background red flowers got bit glossy, the glossy gel medium worked pretty well, too.

When making image transfers the key thing is to make sure the image is really glued down. If there are areas that are not attached to the background the image on those spots will easily peel off when removing the paper on the image.

I have to admit that my image transfer was not a complete success. When misting and rubbing some parts of her face started peeling off. Maybe I had not put engouth gel medium on that area, and the image was not completely glued down. I removed all the loose pieces, cut anothger head from a duplicate print, glued it down with gel medium and rubbed off the paper again. The transferred image is very translucent, so the center of her face (only one layer of image print) is much darker than the edges (two layers if print). I did not mind that.
For mixing the glossy gel medium spots to the background and for creating a good base for Neocolor II shading I covered the entire card with clear gel medium. Some of the red Promarker colour bleeded on the image but I did not mind that either :D

When trimming the image to the size of the card base I got a leftover piece of the red flowers. I placed it on the inside of the card, continuing the theme of the card front.

Despite of the additional image transfer steps I had to take I enjoyed making this project. I have already few other images printed and I'm looking forward to using this same technique for an art journal page.

Looking forward to seeing your red themed projects in the MMCC link list!

Wishing you a nice week,
Hugs,