Initial D Shrink Film Experiment

I was so happy with my rainbow feather piece that I wanted to try this method out again. I loved how the rainbow feather turned out but I felt it was just a bit too detailed, so I set out to simplify the design. I started out with a sketch of an initial D.

I really loved how this sketch turned out. I didnt add the color or fine details in the sketch. I chose to wait until I put it on the plastic. I made up two pieces of the film and tranferred the design onto them for shrinking. I wanted to do one piece with the sharpie markers and one with the prismacolor to compare the two. I immediately made a mistake by tranferring the design onto the wrong side of one of the pieces. I went ahead and finished it anyway though as I wanted to see how it would look with it done on the wrong side. The piece done on the right side is with the colored pencil, the wrong side is the marker one.

So here below are the first two  pieces. The one on the left is the one done on the wrong side. As you can see the colors are very muted. I guess this could be used in some applications but I felt it wasn’t suitable for this application. The second one I thought turned out great. I was so excited about it that I set out to wrap it right away. Silly me! I totally forgot to seal it before I started and before I was even halfway finished with the bezel the ink had rubbed off the front of the piece. The bezel also didn’t work so two fails in one day! 

So I went on to do two more pieces. I was determined to get this piece right. I again repeated the same experiment, one with marker and one with pencil. This time I inked them both on the right side. This time they both turned out great so I went on to seal them. I decided to use the spray sealer to eliminate the brush stroke that were somewhat evident on the rainbow feather. Boy was that a mistake. I am not sure if it would have worked if I had used a lighter touch but what happend was a reaction with the ink  and the sealer. It leaked into the background.Two more pieces regulated to the scrap pile. One good thing though, I can use these with the resin experiments I want to try out as soon as it gets a bit warmer. It is still way too cold up on this mountain for the resin to cure well without using lots of heat in the room.

I was still determined to do this right. I made one more piece. This time with the pencil as I had decided from the previous batches that the pencil looks just a bit better than the marker. Though really it is a close call. They both look quite good in my opinion. So here is the final piece inked and then shrunk.

Finally a good result!  I am still not crazy about the background and would probably be more likely to use this with images that fill the whole piece. I still have to play with this more. What do you think? Do you like the results? Would you wear something like this?