Crap!

Let's be honest - that's not what I said, but I'm trying to be family friendly here.

I like to experiment. I enjoy learning new things, and I like a challenge. The up side is that sometimes experimentation leads to wondeful results.

The down side is what happened today. As soon as I started brushing matte medium onto some of my blocks, a colors started to smear. I'd used a couple of colors that I don't typically use and even though I'd put down those layers more than a week ago, they somehow hadn't hardened and smeared when the medium touched them.

You can see the smearing in the photo that shows the edge of the rust-colored block: the blue runs off to the left.

Both jars of the problem colors went into the garbage.

I pulled all the paper cutouts off the blocks and gave them a sealer coat of matte medium to lock the smeary colors in place. Because it's raining, I don't trust anything to dry fully today and will give them a full 24-48 hours before doing any more.

The second problem is the new origami paper that I tried. In some places, the medium saturated the paper, making it transparent. You can see it in the photo of the yellow block with the pale blue snowflake.

Phooey. Now I'll have to find some better paper and cut a bunch more shapes. I should have played around with that paper more before going to the effort of cutting out all those shapes.

Before I give up, I'm trying one more experiment - I've coated the back of one of those shapes with matte medium to see if that seals the paper so I can use it anyway. It's drying now and looks promising.