Planning Stages of a New Project

For the last two or three days I have been in the planning stages for a new piece of art work. I'm not yet ready to show the entire printed fabric because I still don't know for sure what I'm going to do with the image.

The image is printed on a piece of cotton sateen that is 36" x 60". I sent it to Spoonflower, http://www.spoonflower.com/ an online printing service. I had done quite a bit of manipulation in PSE to achieve the image I wanted. When I entered the image on Spoonflower's web site I elected to have the mirror image printed. This provided some really intriguing secondary images. This photo is a very small part of the whole but one that I need to get settled in my mind before I proceed.

This image was taken in CA at the Huntington Gardens. Again I did some manipulation on this image to drop out the background as well as add a little to the image by cloning. I want to place this image in the dark center of the photo above.

This image was done with paper to explore the size I needed for the opening as well as the light/dark of the statue. I like this but felt the statue was to bright and wanted to dull it down a bit.

I printed an 8 x 11 piece of cotton sateen with the close up image. The dark area came up to light but I wanted to go ahead an explore using TAP (Transfer Artist Paper) to transfer the image of the statue to the background. I found the image to be too dark. I played around on the same piece of fabric transferring the image just to see what it looked like on different areas.

I reprinted the image on fabric again after darkening it a bit. I also lightened up the image by using the opaque control in PSE. As you can see the image hardly shows at all and I get a glossy/smeared look where the image was applied. I also tried different areas on the fabric print to see show the image looked on various locations.

Now to my problem. I love TAP, it transfers better than any method I've ever used.
However, it finally occurred to me that the transfer is ink and when you try to transfer black ink to almost black fabric it just isn't going to work. I hope someone out there has a solution for me.