Weekender-DIY: How to be a painter or the incredibly easy technique of image transfers

Though I`ve been living in my own little appartment for about 3 weeks now and have finished my interior decorating already, the image transfer trick I`ve found several years ago came to my mind again, when I had the urge to make my room even comfier by hanging up picture frames. I took two silver frames with me from home, but unfortunately I had no image to go with them and second, I realized they would not have the eyecatcher-function I was looking for. As you might know, a few outdated wooden furniture (i.e. wardrobe, bed, table and two chairs) came along my flat, so I painted a picture to hang up next to the wardrobe in order to draw the viewer`s attention away from the clothes cupboard towards my "artwork"...

If this subject is somehow familiar to you - you`re right. I do not claim that this monkey with headphones is a drawing out of my hand, I just re-painted it. For personal use in your private home, it is alright to copy original artwork in my opinion, but never forget to mention that it`s not your own innovative idea!
Never mind, this is the original.

That`s how you do it:
You can choose whatever subject you like, this tutorial should just be an inspiration...

1) Have a look in the internet or art books, then use a program like Rasterbator in order to enlarge your source graphic to a size you would like to have.
2) Print it out, at least one time for the outlines (in this case it isn`t necessary to colour-print) and in dependence of the difficulty of your chosen artwork, probably a second copy. Eventually you need to glue the single pages together before you go on.

3) Cut it out. You can now take a pencil (!) and outline your image.

4) Put your cut-out aside and work on the background. In my case, the original backdrop was olive-green-like, which would not have necessarily fit to my white-red-black-brown-room colour concept, so I`d chosen red as my background colour.


5) I recommend you to work from the inside to the outside, because the main contour has a greater priority than the edges.

6) I did not paint the back plain red; instead I took cotton sticks and polka-dotted the whole background area with leaving the middle as it is. After that I joined a bunch of dots with a red marker, without a system, just at random.

7) Now it`s time for the details and the technique I`m talking about all time.
Take your cut-out and have an eye on the next smaller part, e.g. the headphones in whole, the chimp`s hand, ... Cut those parts out and lay either the single part or the complete graphic without this single part (as you favour) on the canvas and draw the outline again, with a pencil. Move on with all pieces - from big to small.




8) Paint and if you need to, take the second (colour-)printout as a template. Add shadows for a finish.








That`s all about it ;)
You can use this "cut out, outline, paint"- technique for any material and for any benefit.























This suitcase originally was plain black and I decorated it with a "Steamboat Willie"-painting, done with the same technique.


Have a nice weekend =D
Neary