Beautiful Dreamer

I did this one so long ago! It's another 5x7 with images by Itkupilli. I'm a little bummed as the image is somewhat cloudy from the gel I put on, I think it mixed with white paint, so It didn't dry completely clear.

Speaking of that gel, I'm totally dumbfounded right now. I can't figure this out. I've been using string gel by Liquitex to cover my collages from day one. I've always had beautiful results.

Until now.

The other day, I decided to to do a second coat of gel on one of the collages I just finished. Well I went downstairs to collect it the next day and the image was gone!!! I'm not kidding it completely disappeared. In it's place were a bunch of cracked lines.

The only thing I could think of was that the second coat must have somehow messed with the inks. So I used it again on a collage I finished yesterday, only using one coat. It did the same thing!! But only on half. See, that particular collage I had printed two pages of inchies, and it only ruined one of the pages.

So naturally, I thought it was the paper. I had used different papers to print the images, and maybe that was the issue. To experiment I took one of each paper, printed out an image and coated it with the string gel. I let it dry overnight and guess what?

Nothing happened!!! The pictures are perfect. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!! I don't know what to do now. It was such a good product, it sealed everything, enhanced the colors and dried perfectly clear, but now I'm afraid to use it for fear of ruining even more collages.

Has anyone ever had this happen to them, or do you know of any good varnishes/sealers, that don't ruin your photos??