PRIMARY TOOLS & MATERIALS:
PENCIL, TONER REACTIVE FOIL

Additional Tools & Materials: micron pen, tracing paper, scanner, Adobe Photoshop, laser printer, card stock, transparent tape, camera

I have had a starter kit of toner reactive foil for several years, and today I finally got the nerve to try it out. I started by drawing this script uppercase 'y,' tracing over it with a micron pen, then scanning into the computer. There I cleaned it up a bit using Adobe Photoshop, filled in the letter shape solid black, and printed onto card stock using my laser printer. 

Here's where it gets tricky. The toner reactive foil suggests that you iron it on after you print. That felt clunky to me. I had read a blog years ago that suggested that instead of ironing on, you could actually tape the foil over your printed design, then print a "blank" page - to use the printer's heat to laminate the foil onto the toner. So that's exactly what I did. The only reason the gold foil looks a little antiqued here is because apparently my printer is low on toner. If it had printed solid black, you would have seen solid gold sticking to it. 

All in all, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I even thought the wasted sheet of foil I peeled off of the design looked pretty sweet, so I scanned it (the last image in the slideshow, for reference) and it looks like a Y sitting in a pool of liquid gold. Delicious. 

I think the theme for this letter study is predictability, in its lack thereof. Either my printer was constantly jamming (miraculously never with the foil inside), or the foil would fold up in the printer, leaving a little ripple in the otherwise uniform foil coverage. This method would require a lot of practice to perfect, but for my first try, I like my distressed gold Y.