How to Transfer an Image

This month has been a whirlwind. Actually, the last couple months life has just been throwing lemons at my head. I find myself with an exceptional amount of time on my hands right now. I’ve been diving head first into my art in order to sooth my soul and accomplish some goals on my ever-expanding drawing board.

I wish I had more to show for it at this moment but I don’t really. If you follow my Instagram account you may have caught a few new pieces and some works in progress. Two commissions I can’t share quite yet and a couple of gifts for others that I can’t share yet and/or haven’t quite finished yet. This post is going to follow the progress of one of the latter and explain how to do a drawing transfer by hand. The exampled image is a gift for my sister’s birthday which hasn’t happened yet, so I’ll be releasing this post a few days after I’ve written it. Ooo, almost like time travel. Hello future readers!

 

How To Transfer an Image

click thumbnails for larger view

Step One:  Have your final rough sketch or image ready.

In this case I’m using a piece by street artist Banksy. This is my sister’s favorite street artist, so much-so that she even has one of his pieces tattooed on her. I felt this piece would really resonate with her personally and thought the girl in it even kind of looked like her. This was the first time I’d used this image transfer technique on anything other than my own drawings. Up until now I’ve used this technique to transfer dog portrait sketches on to the final page without risking ruining said page with my first few attempts.

 

Step Two: Trace your image onto tracing paper.
A light box helps (or a window on a sunny day, if you can stand drawing vertical).

Choose your surface you want to transfer the image on to.

To the left you’ll see the primed canvas board I chose to use. This was also a first for me and at this point I really had no clue whether the transferred image would even show up on the painted surface.

 

Step Three: Prep your surface

Technically, this could be step one or two if you want it to be. Prep whatever surface you’re transferring your image to, if prepping is required. You can use this technique to transfer images onto just about any surface that will accept the medium you use to transfer it with (see step four).

I’m pretty impatient and hate waiting for paint to dry so used a small space heater to help me out. Once it was mostly dry I rubbed it with a dry paper towel. This caused the washed out spaces you’ll see in the following images of the canvas. This was done simply for artistic effect. You can wait for the whole thing to dry if you wish 😉

 

Step Four: Flip your traced image over so it appears mirrored. Cover the back of the tracing paper along where your drawing is with a soft pencil such as a 6B or higher, or a soft medium such as pastel, charcoal etc.

Be as precise or messy as you’d like, I found it doesn’t make much of a difference either way. One thing I’d suggest is using a different coloured pencil for your original traced drawing because once the graphite is added to the back it can be harder to see your first drawing in detail.

 

Step Five: Place your tracing page graphite side down onto your prepared (or unprepared) surface of choice wherever you wish the drawing to sit on the page.
Use a different coloured pencil (red works well) to trace your image again.

I taped the left and bottom edges to the binder I had placed under the canvas board. So no tape was touching the canvas itself.

The left corner I secured with a binder clip, securing page to canvas.

Step Six: Now that you have a rough stencil of your drawing transferred to the page of your choice you can add details, colour, paint etc.