Creative Plastic

While shopping in Staples at the weekend for some t shirt transfer paper I saw this paper.

It’s called Creative Plastic and it is from a company called DECAdry.
It works in the same way as shrink plastic but is made specifically to go through an inkjet printer. It’s quite expensive at £9.99 for 5 sheets so I have only experimented a couple of times so far. I want to be sure I know exactly what I am doing before attempting another batch.

Using a photo from my ink and bleach samples, I printed on both sides of the paper using wallet prints – 9 prints to the page.

Each individual print was cut out. This is the size of each print before baking.

I have kept all the offcuts as you can also use coloured pencil and marker pens to decorate.

Holes were made using a punch before baking.

The pieces are laid onto baking parchment before placing in the oven for just 4 minutes.

As soon as I put them in the hot oven they did this..

… and then this.

But towards the end of the baking time they had started to flatten out.

This photo shows what they looked like when they finally came out of the oven,

and this photo shows the size they had shrunk to.

Not very exciting this first trial. I’m going to try treasure gold and maybe some different mediums to see if I can get a better effect before stitching them down or joining them.

This was my second experiment. It's one of the Samurai pictures off the front cover of my Research Project book. This time I printed the photo out A4 size and then cut it up. Seems to work much better. Although you can’t see it very well in the photo, the colours are so much sharper in this one.

Once I can find one of my artwork photos that will show up really well I am going to try and enclose them in the machine knitted wire as I did before, but this time I will use a lighter coloured finer wire.

As ever, if anyone has used this before and wants to share any hints and tips - please do!