Winding Down with Spill It!

In the spirit of full disclosure, here’s the last of what I’ve done with my two Spill It! canvases for Carmen’s class, at least for the transfer technique. The house came out better than the flower, but safe to say both of them will be collaged over for other projects. (First look at the house here.) I added some paint around the edges and a few more dabs here and there on the house, but there really was no hope for my flowers! I’ve been trying to figure out what went wrong here, and best I can tell, I, um we, scrubbed too much and got all the way back down to the canvas, which you can really see on the left side (below). I say “we” because I let Sarah and Olivia have their way with rubbing the paper off this one.

So what would I have done differently? First, I wouldn’t have tackled such a large canvas (11 x 14) for my first efforts. Smaller probably would have been better in this case. Second, I wouldn’t have had my friend Melissa, who owns a print shop, print the photo copies for me. I neglected to tell her what I was doing so she printed them out on nice, high quality glossy paper, assuming I was going to use them as they were…as photographs! When I asked Carmen about this, she agreed that the higher quality paper probably did make the rubbing off more difficult. Overall though, I learned a ton and Carmen is incredibly encouraging. I learned that I love making backgrounds the way Carmen demonstrated (here) and that I’m not crazy about image transfers. Still working through the basic collage and drip writing lessons so I’ll share those with you soon.