How to make a transfer from your original tea bag art

And for further information - this was not my original idea - I found it on Lynne Hoppes Blog.

Start out with your tea bag in the size that is big enough for the image you want to paint.

This happens to be an unused tea bag because I had no used tea bags left at the time of this tutorial.  I drew my image on the tea bag with a graphite pencil.

I then added Derwent academy Oil pastel white to the skin sections of my "Porcelain Lady"

Then using gouache and Prisma watercolor pencils I added color.  I found that you either had to add gouache straight out of the tube (no water added) or watercolor pencils to be able to add color over the oil pastel but I don't think if I do this again that I will use the oil pastel if I have such a large area to cover and transfer because the watercolor pencil I added over the oil pastel did not transfer well (I did not try gouache straight out of the tube on this one) I then added a watercolor background.

I used Matte Medium by Liquitex to transfer my image to a 5X7 piece of watercolor paper.  Take your tea bag and turn it face down on your watercolor paper or journal page .....

Then spread the Matte Medium heavily over the image starting in the center so that you don't have a bunch of wrinkles as that will prevent some areas from transferring.  Use your brush to mush the matte medium into the tea bag to make sure it gets absorbed.

This is what the original tea bag looked like after the transfer.  It retained most of it's color and detail.

This is the image that I ended up with on my watercolor paper and as you can see, the watercolor pencil detail that I added over the skin did not transfer much. Next time I will try gouache straight from the tube or don't use oil pastel at all - just watercolor, gouache and/or watercolor pencil.

The image on the left is the original tea bag with a few touchups.   The image on the right is the transfer with touchups.

Here is another tea bag that I did a transfer of - I thought on this one I would try Matte Gel rather than Matte medium - didn't work well!

Image face down on watercolor paper with Matte gel added.

This was the resulting transfer image - wish I had used matte medium instead of matte gel because I think this image would have been really lovely with almost no touchup needed if I had.

The image on the left is the original with touchups and the image on the right is the transfer with touchups.  I wish I had not been as heavy handed on the transfer image - I would have preferred her to be more patchy!

Thank you for visiting and I hope I have given you some inspiration and would love to see what you create.

And for further information - this was not my original idea - I found it on Lynne Hoppes Blog.