Fun with Foil and Glue

What do you get when you combine glue, tin foil, shoe polish, and a bit of creativity? A really simple and unique piece of art.

I had so much fun with my project this week. I found this tutorial through Pinterest and really wanted to try it because it seemed so easy, creative, and inexpensive. I was right. This project was easy enough for a kid to try and left a lot of room for creative freedom, while using supplies that I already owned.

I suggest reading briefly reading though the original tutorial (linked above) to get a feel for the project. Here are my experiences with it:

First, I cut out a piece of foam core and sketched my design in pencil. I didn't do the same design as the one in the tutorial, but that's what's so cool about this project. You can make the design anything you want! You can use names, words, quotes, images, symbols, patterns, or anything else that sparks your interest. I chose a simple swirl design this time, but I plan on incorporating words and quotes into some designs I do in the future.

Next I took my Tacky Glue and traced the pattern on my foam core. The stroke of the glue wasn't totally consistent, which kind of bugged me, but it worked out perfectly in the end and actually added to the grungy effect. This step made me realize that it's important to keep your design simple, because the glue could potentially mess up a design that's really busy and/or bold.

After my glue dried, which took a few hours, I covered the board with aluminum foil. I covered the back of the foil sheet using a glue stick and carefully pressed it over my design. I smoothed out the foil and defined the embossed parts by pressing around them with a cotton swab. I had to be careful not to rip through the foil for this part because that would have really sucked and I would've had to start over. So be careful while smoothing out the foil!

Here's a close-up of the foil-covered design.

The last step was covering the foil with shoe polish. This was such a fun step because it totally changed the feeling of the piece. After dabbing the shoe polish and roughing-up some parts, the piece looked really grungy and metallic. When I try this project again in the future I want to experiment a little with this step by trying colorful paint or something instead of black shoe polish. Maybe I could use a red/orange paint and make it look like rusted metal. There are endless possibilities with this project. 

Like I said about a million times, I had so much fun with this project! I recommend this to anybody, even those who aren't artistically inclined. It was so easy and effortless, yet it produced a one-of-a-kind piece of art. Expect another post with this same type of project pretty soon, because I can't wait to get started on another one!