Okay so yesterday afternoon/last night I tried doing my first gel transfer as one of the paintings I’m working on right now required text. I first read about gel transfers in one of the mixed media books I have (don’t ask me which one, I have…a few…I think it was Altered Art though) and then when I joined Suzi Blu’s Ning community last summer, some of the ladies there mentioned it after I gave someone instructions for doing packing tape transfers and then again, in one of Suzi Blu’s videos she showed the same gel transfer technique I’d read and been told about so I figured it was a fairly basic thing.

So as I said, yesterday I tried it for the first time except it ended up going horribly wrong and I was wondering if any of my artist friends had some insight into why.

I was using Golden Gel Medium in matte finish. I applied it to the area in a thin layer and placed my reversed-text piece of paper face down over top and burnished the back. My printer is a B&W laser printer, so it uses toner, which from what I’ve read is essential to the gel transfer process as the toner binds to the gel medium which is why the whole thing works and why it doesn’t work so well with ink-jets.

Then I let it dry for about 8 hours until it was “bone dry”, there wasn’t a pinprick’s worth of moisture left. Then I took a clean paintbrush that had never been used and painted the paper with water liberally until it was soaked through and began to lightly rub the paper off with my fingers in a circular motion.

Much to my horror, the toner started coming off with it. Not completely but just bits here and there, except if I’d have kept rubbing to get ALL of the paper off, all of the toner would have come off with it so I left it a little bit “fuzzy”.

I ended up hand-painting the lettering using what was left of the toner as a guide, sort of on top of the thin layer of paper that was left.

This made me a very sad panda. What went wrong? Did I not use enough gel medium? Did I use too much water? There’s no way I rubbed too hard, I was going super light. I know I was using the right product.

In the end it turned out fine because the font I was using wasn’t very complicated, but what do I do for my next painting where I know I’m going to be using a more flowery font that I wouldn’t be able to hand-paint if my life depended on it? Because of the backgrounds I use in my painting, just printing and pasting text isn’t an option, I need the transparency of a gel transfer. I could do a packing tape transfer if I absolutely had to but because I use glitter in my paintings, which makes for a grainy surface, packing tape transfers don’t take so well.

So any advice on this would be greatly appreciated. And yes yes I know I belong to at least one Ning community where I could ask this question but I was afraid it had already been covered (even though I couldn’t find it) and I’m still a n00b in that community so I was reluctant to ask. If no one replies to this post, I will ask there, I just don’t know where to put my question or how to ask…

Anyway, thanks in advance.