The Struggle Was Not In The Creating

Instead, it was in the scanning. I could not get a sharp scan of today's collage. Photoshop helped me sharpen up the image some, but the image you see is not exactly what it looks like in real life.

 

The horse is a gel transfer. First, the image was printed onto a transparency. Then gel medium was smeared onto the collage, and the image was placed face down on the gel medium. After some firm rubbing with the back of the spoon, most of the image had transferred. I did go back in with pastels, to add some extra strength (!) to the image.

Now, about that scanning problem. The only difference between today's collage, and the previous ones, was that I sprayed fixative on today's work. I used more pastels in this one, and there was smearing issues. So now I'm wondering, is there something about the coating of fixative that could have affected the scanning? What do you think?