Transferring a photo to wood

To keep me busy today I decided to try a craft I saw on Pinterest. I want to make some art for over our new bed  and I have always wanted to hang some of my photography so I thought this would be a great combo. Is it just me or are just plain photos (no matter the content) are so boring! Being a photographer, that is probably shocking for me to say, but I have always felt like they are missing something. Well, I think I have found my solution! 2 actually, but one is much similar than the other.
If you are a fan of Pinterest, you have seen tutorials for transferring photos to wood. I was a bit skeptical that it would actually work until this afternoon. I found a piece of scrap wood in our garage that was 5”x6” and chose this picture

at random from my portfolio and printed it on my printer on normal printer paper. I figured I would start with the easiest stuff first. I covered the wood with mod podge and used the back of spoon to smooth out the bubbles in the paper. The tutorials I found say to leave it over night but I got impatient and after about 4 hours I thought I would give it a try. I got my fingers wet and slowly started to rub the paper off with water. Obviously you have to be gentle with this but for whatever reason, the image sticks to the wood and the paper crumbles off! Here is a picture I took after I rubbed the paper off:

** sorry for the lame iphone pics in this post. Like my toes in this picture?? lol did I mention I am being really lazy lately?! ;)

As I was typing this I turned around to look at it and noticed that when it dried it had a white “film” over it. I had not rubbed all of the paper off so I wet it again and scrubbed a little more. You have to be careful because you don’t want to rub too hard or you will rub the image off in spots. I don’t mind the roughness around the edges and depending on the picture, a little distressing could be cool. If it is someone’s face, though, I would not recommend it! lol
I decided to try adding a top layer of mod podge to the top while it was still damp to see if that helps. we shall see…

A few hours later, Here is what it looks like. It’s not perfect so I need to do some playing around with different materials, but I think I could really make some cool artwork!