Wood transfer activity

The wood: acquiring this is your responsibility. You can get a plank of wood from Dollarama, Home Depot, Rona or your garage. The plank should be about the size of a letter sized sheet of paper, more if you want a border, less if you don’t. It should be flat and smooth on one side so that the printed photo can stick to it and transfer well. Your board should be real wood. Untreated wood (not stained or varnished) works best.

The photo: To transfer the image to wood it has to be reversed in Photoshop. If you are using an existing photo, you’ll need to scan it, crop, edit, add text, flip it in Photoshop, and then print it in class. Once finalized, you will transfer the image to your wood block and add your final sealer and gloss.

Some considerations

• Your portrait should have high contrast or it won’t look good on your wood block

• There shouldn’t be a lot of busy background details in your image

• You can work in colour or in black and white

• For a portrait, your face should take up at least half the frame

• Consider open vs. closed composition