Reflective Writing April 16, 2010
The experience of teaching my cohort peers a new printmaking technique was quite fulfilling during this work session at Grady High, particularly since everyone soon made use of the technique in our collaborative art project. Our image-making session followed a presentation by a visiting APAL artist. The subject matter for our joint artwork was to be influenced by Daniel Pink’s book, “A Whole New Mind”. The technique I shared was a solvent-transfer of Xeroxed or laser-printed images. I had just learned it the same week in my printmaking class at the Chastain Art Center. It involves a relatively safe solvent paint stripper to soften the toner on black-and-white or color copies made on a standard copier or laser printer. The key is to have an image printed with a plastic-based toner or color ink—not an ink-jet printed image, nor one from a magazine that is printed on coated paper. The Citrustrip Gel product is available for about $12 per quart, and should be enough for hundreds of transfer prints. I would recommend using it with gloves, taking care to not get it on exposed skin. Although the solvent is much safer than others used for this process such as MEK or Wintergreen oil, adequate ventilation still should be provided. Applied liberally to the back of the intended image, black-and-white and color images transfer well if the toner is well heat-set by the copier that produced them. Note that you need to wait several minutes for the solvent to penetrate the paper when the stripper is applied to the back of the image. I recommend lightly taping the image down so it does not shift when it is placed over the paper to which it is to be transferred. Be sure to remove the excess gel stripper that hasn’t penetrated the paper by scraping with scraps of matboard. The same gel can be reused many times to transfer images. After the gel is removed and the back of the image is covered with wax paper, you can start burnishing the image down. Moderate pressure with a burnishing object such as a wooden spoon or a smooth glass bottle is all that is needed to get a good black image; however, color Xeroxes require more pressure. This is a good time to pull out that rarely used printing press to run your paper and the original through with enough pressure to get a good color image transfer. I believe you will find the technique useful for work with students 5th grade and up. Good Luck.
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