how i spent friday

1} i painted a canvas. 

note: i don't have painting skills, so i just sat there for a little while, then tentatively dabbed paint in some places. even though i was wearing a frilly shirt and listening to pedro the lion and just felt very artistic overall that day, i could not for the life of me successfully transfer my mental images to the canvas on the table. i eventually made myself so disgusted and angry that i grabbed a paper towel and scrubbed at the canvas in a kind of frantic effort to erase what i'd done. 

needless to say, that did not work.

it ended up like this:

2} i doodled on some papers with a sharpie marker. i drew a girl flying a kite, and some stars, and some flowers, and some squiggles reminiscent of the things that decorated my social studies notes in grade 12. 

i arranged the doodles on the canvas to make sure they would fit. {they would.}

3} i scanned my doodles onto the computer, arranged them onto a word document, saved it as a jpeg, and took it to the printshop down the street, where it cost me $2 to get it printed off on a laser jet printer on ledger-sized paper. because my ink jet doesn't cut it.

4} i acquired some gloss gel from a neat little art shop around the corner. i painted five thin coats of the gloss gel over my picture, allowing it to dry in between coats.

5} after letting the last coat dry, which only really took about 15 minutes {which is a very good thing as i am totally impatient} i got to the fun part.

remember when you were in fifth grade and you were learning about the solar system and you hated the solar system and so instead of taking notes you drew a picture on your fingertip and poured a drop of glue on top and let it dry and then peeled it off and the picture transferred to the glue? 

that's my basic understanding of this process. 

except instead of just peeling the glue off of the paper, i flipped the whole thing upside down {in a pan full of water} and scrubbed the paper off with a toothbrush--revealing my doodles beneath! on a clear, flat glob of dried gel gloss. 

6} i plopped it down on my dried canvas {which i'd just painted a coat of gel gloss onto} and painted yet another coat of gel gloss on top of it, to make it stick. 

this is sort of how it turned out, minus the fact that in real life it's much less grainy and doesn't look like a crappy cell phone picture of a painting. 

all-in-all, kind of a fun little project.
i found it on this website a while back.