CLEAR PACKAGING TAPE TRANSFERS
Following Maremi Small Art on YouTube, today I made some more washi tape substitutes using clear packaging tape. I have got some old catalogues which came as junk mail from a local garden centre and they’ve got some pretty good pictures in them. I spent some time fussy cutting various flowers for my stash, and then decided to make use of some of the other pages which had larger pictures or things that weren’t suitable for fussy cutting.
The idea is to cut off a length of clear packaging tape or sellotape (the packaging tape is better because it’s nice and wide). You stick it on your clothing a few times to reduce the stickiness a bit, and then press it down onto the page. Then you pull it off and all or part of the picture comes off on the sticky part of the tape. The results are pretty varied – sometimes I pressed it back on again to get a bit more of the image. Other times I think the tape was still too sticky and the paper just tore rather than peeling off.
It didn’t matter – I added another stage which I’ve seen others do with this sort of technique. I put the tapes in warm soapy water for a few minutes and then spread them out and rubbed off the remaining paper. Where there is no image, the tape is transparent. The broken images are quite interesting and the tapes can make useful backgrounds.
Where there is no image, even after soaking in water, the tapes are still sticky, but I would always add more glue to make sure they stuck down properly.
You can remove the shine from the surface of the tape once it’s stuck down on your project, by painting it with clear gesso or matte medium. Not having stuck any of the tapes down yet, I haven’t had a chance to try this.
So far, I’m very pleased with the result, and I’m very pleased to have found another way of turning rubbish into art. I already use junk mail for glueing on, to save glue getting all over my work surface, and when the page gets too sticky, I turn it over and start on a fresh page. I now know I can remove the useful images first and turn them into something else.
