Gratitude Journal Page & Pogo Transfers

I did this journal page the other night, on Gratitude. I felt I was needing to do a page on gratitude, and with Thanksgiving the day before, it seemed appropriate.

This has a lot of things going on. I used gesso, acrylic paint, 2 packing tape transfers, a stencil (in the background, by The Crafter’s Workshop), hand-carved & handmade stamps, collaged ephemera, polaroid pogo print emulsion transfers, glaze pens, latte sweet pens, copic markers, sharpie poster paint markers, watercolor crayons, rubber stamps, and crayons. I did the writing with a Uni-ball Double Sided Pocket Brush Pen, which I love. The main photo is of the mannequin on my front porch. Unfortunately, I didn’t seal the pages before I closed the book, and the crayons transferred in places onto the mannequin’s face. When I use something that might smear or transfer onto another page, I like to seal the spread with Krylon workable fixative.

This was the first time I tried to do emulsion lifts/transfers from pogo prints. It was easy enough to get the yellow & magenta layer to lift off in one piece after soaking the print for around 40 minutes to an hour. But for the life of me, I couldn’t get the final blue layer to lift. I even tried soaking it overnight. It seemed very thin and fragile, and would only come off in tiny pieces. After the emulsion transfer of the cross was dry, I colored it with copic markers.

I learned how to do the emulsion transfers, and other alterations, from this fabulous video.

Here are detail shots of the transfers right after I applied them, before I colored the one on the right with copic markers.

In the above photo, you can see the print with the blue layer on it soaking in a container of water. After unsuccessfully trying again to lift off the blue layer, I decided just to use it for collage. I wonder how other people are able to get the blue layer off?

Earlier in the year I played with double exposures, which are super easy to do. You can read about them here and here.