If the material doesn't want to work with you...

...then you have to work with the material.

I found the small piece of scrap of Lenox that I had, sanded down a piece of plexi, sponged/brushed on the gel medium, attached the fairly smooth Lenox, and voila...it didn't work! You don't see the brush strokes, but you definitely see shiny and dull spots. I am guessing this is caused by spots of the gel medium being dryer or wetter. Since I'd be working on larger sheets of plexi than my test strips, there's no way that I'd be able to control the dry/wet-ness of the gel medium as I worked. So I decided this wasn't going to work.

But if the material does not want to cooperate, I will make it work for me, in its own way. I tried writing using the gel medium (a clear acrylic medium) and then attaching it to the clear, unsanded plexi, and voila...I got something! Here are 2 views of the result. Depending on the position of the light source, the text ('text', how original) can be almost invisible, mirror like, or matte. I did get a picture of the almost invisible version, but it just looked like a piece of white paper. This is great, less work for me, I don't need to sand the plexi.





Then I gocco printed some texts and solids on the plexi. Based on this test, I will print just text on the plexi and no graphics. the texts were printed in white and pale green. And the white was great! Again, in some light, you can barely see that there's printing on there (white ink on white paper). With the light coming from the right direction, the white ink casted a nice shadow on the paper underneath.





On other fronts -- took the violin to the shop today. They adjusted the tail piece, checked the sound post and put on new strings for me. The bow is being rehaired and won't be ready for another few days, this being 'high season' for bow-rehairing!