Our local surface design group met today and we played with a product new to us called Lazertran. Bunny took care of ordering all the supplies and figuring out what we needed. Basically this is a transfer process so we all came with photographs to transfer.
Carole did a demo for us. These are the decal type Lazertran sheets. They can be applied to smooth surfaces such as glass, tile or even wood. Once the Lazertran sheet is printed in the computer, it is soaked in plain water and the paper backing is removed. Then it is applied directly to the tile. Once it has dried, the item is baked in the oven at 200 degrees for 10 minutes. Aren’t Carole’s great grand kids cute?
The other process that you can use with Lazertran is to apply it to fabric. There is a specific Lazertran sheet for silk, for white fabric, for black fabric and for decals. The instructions are all different with each kind. So it gets a little confusing. Once the Lazertran sheet is printed, the white borders are cut off. For the silk variety, you iron the Lazertran to the fabric and then soak it in water to remove the paper backing. Here’s Louise showing off her creation. This is a photo of one of her original pieces of artwork.
The Lazertran sheets for other fabric has you peel the paper backing off first and then ironing it to the fabric. The left hand photo shows a photo of Paula’s mother and the right hand photo is a decal on a tile of Sally’s original artwork. I only ended up making one piece and I have a couple more that I will probably do here at home. The hand of the fabric is really changed by the decals and they are quite shiny and have the look of plastic. I couldn’t decide what I would do with any of these as they aren’t really my style. But perhaps I can figure out what to put my decal on eventually. Have you used Lazertran before? Did you like it?
Ruth Lane Art 
It was a fun day. Thank you Ruth for the kind words for my great grand daughters.
Thanks for all the work you did printing out the Lazertran Carole!
Very cool, it’s kind of like photo transfer to tee shirts, but I don’t think it was that brand I’ve used. Perhaps you can use it for more nuno experiments using the nuno as a frame for the picture.
Thanks Marilyn – they are like tee shirt transfers. Supposedly these are supposed to work “much better” than a tee shirt transfer and they seem kind of expensive to me. And yes, you could probably nuno them but I think that the photo would be very wrinkled due to the shrinkage as there are no spaces in the photo for the wool to penetrate.
I haven’t used Lazertran, but I used to do water-slide transfers onto plates with my dad in the early 80’s and the first type sounds a lot like that. The teeshirt one sounds like some teeshirt transer medium I had years ago, you smeared it all over the print, put it face down, then soaked the paper off later. I did have some excellent iron on transfer paper about 10-15 years ago, I might have to see if I have any left! They all look good though, did the tile ones look better?
Thanks Zed – sounds like you have lots of experience with transfers. I think the tile ones looked better because the surface of the tile is shiny and so is the transfer. But the transfer itself was much thicker than I thought it would be so the edges are very visible.
Not tried this brand but have tried to nuno with silk “printed” with t-shirt transfer paper, as you say it had a plasticky hand and only the areas not covered with the transfer felted, not something I can think of a use for but it is interesting to see the group’s results on different media.
Thanks Teri, I agree that it isn’t much use for what I normally create. I have two more printed that I haven’t used. Not sure what to do with them.