This year at the Omaha Arts Festival I saw numerous glossy acrylic and metal prints of photos and artwork but thought it was out of reach price-wise. I lean towards finding ways to cut out the ‘middle-man’. My friend Kari sells her photography on cards and metal picture panels. Still, I assumed it comes at a cost and I wanted to keep my margins as large as I could, so I never looked into it.

My parents saw her metal prints on the wall at the Down Under Lounge and fell in love. They started kicking around the idea of having pictures of their 100ish flowers they grow in their garden. We started doing the math on outsourcing and it didn’t look promising. I decided to do some research and see what it would take to attempt to do this less expensive.

I did some research and discovered it’s something that can be done at home with the right equipment. You need a printer that can accept refillable cartridges and work with sublimation ink. You need transfer papers and a heat-press. I was gifted a heat-press from my friend Juan years ago and I never put it to use. So, I dug even further on the knowledge-seeking.

Here’s my summary of knowledge. You can get a printer for under $400. You can get an ink kit that has refillable tanks and bottles of sublimation in for about $90. Transfer papers are about $40 for 110 13×19 sheets. I bought a couple of other items for the heat-press like Teflon and parchment paper sheets. Basically, sublimation is baking on the dye-ink. I only have a flat heat-press, but you can buy different presses for hats and mugs. You should start off with a white substrate for true colors, but you can sublimate onto wood or other lighter colored shirts. I did watch a video where they were sublimating on dark heathered shirts and bleaching the shirts. The surprising thing was the sublimation image remained in place and wasn’t bleached out at all.

Needless to say, I’ve found a great new hobby and method to get my art out into the world. Attached are some of the first results of sublimating onto aluminum chromaluxe picture panels, glossy white, and some thinner aluminum business cards that have a bit of a pearl surface, reflecting little sparkles like glitter.