Shoe tranfers..

[wanderaimlessly.livejournal.com]

I made a post a while back asking if anyone knew of ways of transferring an image onto canvas shoes. There were a few suggestions but I chose this one because it seemed the most fool proof.

I bought some gel medium from an art shop, then made photocopies of the images I wanted to use, resizing them a bit so they would fit properly.

I cut around the images carefully using a craft knife, then covered the fronts with gel medium. One I'd placed it on the shoe I rubbed down the surface, pressing hard. This part is important, make sure any wee fiddly bits are down properly (I didn't do this well enough and a few parts didn't stick properly).

I completely soaked the shoe, I didn't intend to, but I needed a lot of water to get the paper off. Do this part fairly gently, so you don't rub off the transfer too. This part took the longest for me.

Partly because some parts came off and partly to make the image stand out more, I went over the lines with permanent marker. I wrote a few lines from the poems that went with the illustrations using the same pen.

I think because I hadn't made sure everything was properly stuck and because canvas is bendy, some of the transfers were starting to break up a little bit, but I covered then with PVA (it'd be better with something else, I'm sure) and they seem to be fine now.

So there you go. I think this could be improved, but for a first time I'm just glad it actually worked as well as it did.