PURPOSE: To make it possible to stably obtain a multi-gradation image in the reduced number of times, by a method wherein an ink sheet divided into solid ink layer regions with (n) kinds of density levels and heat transfer is successively superposed to a part or the whole of picture elements to be recorded.

CONSTITUTION: Density regions AWC of first W third solid ink layers 11W13 are set to a multiple recording ink sheet 14 so that optical reflected densities obtained by subtracting the background density of plain paper are brought to 0.25 0.5 and 1.0 in a gray scale of 0W7Do. In this case, when inks of the first W the third solid ink layers 11W13 having densities of AWC are transfered and superposed corresponding to the picture element densities of an image to be developed on the plain paper 4, picture element densities of N=23=8 gradations are obtained. When eight kinds of the solid ink layers are prepared, picture element densities with 256 gradations are obtained and a recording time can be shortened to a large extent while a multi-gradation image or a color image can be stably obtained.