Read All About It

Words are wonderful things. They have meaning, they have form and they have beautiful shape—especially words from languages we don’t speak. Think of all the wonderful ephemera out there: old postcards, vintage magazines, ledger pages, books, pattern papers … the possibilities are endless.

TECHNIQUE ONE: Leftover Layers

Layer a leftover transparency over a book or ledger page. You can then scan it, print it and use it as a transfer or collage paper.

If you think you might want to use it in a gel transfer, you will need to flip the image before you print. Otherwise the text will print backwards (which can be a nice effect, too).

SEAT OF KNOWLEDGE

Sandra Duran Wilson

In this finished piece, I glued the transparency (to which I added a transfer of an image of a tree) onto another substrate using a spray adhesive.

TECHNIQUE TWO: Print and Glue it

Cut your ledger, magazine or book page to fit your printer carriage—or tape them carefully to a carrier paper—and print an image onto it. If you have an inkjet printer, make sure you spray your print with a workable fixative before using it as a collage element.

TECHNIQUE THREE: Scan It, Print It, Transfer It

There are so many ways to transfer a copy of your ephemera. The beauty of most transfers is their transparency. Remember that anything that looks white in printing is actually absent of color, so when you use this in a transfer, you will see the underlying color. This leads us to the next chapter on creating layers.