How to Transfer an Image or Design

An easy image transfer technique that does not require any special tools. Great for text designs!

There are so many awesome techniques for transferring designs to surfaces such as wood, tile, or painted surface. I have used the wax image transfer technique, stencils, my silhouette cameo, and mod podged more items than I care to admit. Every technique has its uses and this one I remember from school art class because it is awesome in a pinch. This technique is generally the one I use for either text or designs that I want to hand paint or color in some way.

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My own handwriting is actually terrible so I often use this image transferring technique on those beautiful script fonts.

If you want to paint or hand draw a simple design or text, you can easily transfer an image to wood, paper, or almost any surface. Image transfer does not require any special equipment with this technique! Example applications could be painted furniture, bare wood, or signs with text.

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So first, I sized the image to what I needed. I used Photoshop because it was easy for me but you can do it in a word document. I printed it off and I cut a circle in this instance so I could center the image properly.

On the backside of the image, I colored with pencil all of the lines I wanted to transfer. This image above is of the deer head and dove. Lay the graphite on thick but don’t press too hard or you could stretch the paper and distort the image. My images are really small but if you have a larger image, watch your hands so they don’t touch the graphite or your hands will be black and smudge everything.

Now turn the image over and trace the image you want to transfer. It transfers beautifully and evenly and I can easily reuse the design to transfer a few more times. I traced the outline of the deer head and colored it in with sharpie in this example.

I made 9 Christmas ornaments for my woodland animals Christmas tree this year, but this technique would work very well for furniture, art, or ceramics.