Thursday, August 18, 2011

Crayon Background Experiments

Here's a fun technique to share. My inspiration comes from a Craft Stamper magazine article by Helen Chilton from this June of a wax crayon masterclass, my friend Janine's blog who tried out and shared a lot of different ways to use crayon shavings in backgrounds (see HERE and HERE and HERE) and then made beautiful cards that I thought looked like Impressionist paintings, and a silly kid's project sandwiching melted crayons between waxed paper to make window hanging ornaments. I used just primary colors from a Crayola box because they would melt and blend beautifully into their secondary colors. After creating crayon shavings, I sandwiched them between two pieces of glassine and ironed them to create what's shown in the first picture.

Allow that to cool - just takes a minute - and slowly pull the glassine apart. With all of mine, I found that one side would have more melted crayon attached. Take that piece of glassine and iron it onto a sheet of paper. Mine is from a Canson tablet sold as mixed media paper that's a thinner weight than watercolor paper.

And this is the result:


You are also left with the piece of glassine, that is a more muted version. Here I've photographed it against the tablet of paper so it shows up better:


So what do you do now? Two beautiful backgrounds, one with brilliant intense color, and another that just happens to have a smooth top surface with all the waxy crayon underneath....hmmmmm.......

I'm going to tease you a bit and make you wait to see just what I did with my backgrounds so until tomorrow..........




7 comments:

trisha too said...

This looks like so much fun--what great results!

Anonymous said...

That's very cool Penny. I love the glassine piece with the muted colors the best and I can't wait to see what you are going to do with it.

Cynthia Schelzig said...

now this looks like you had fun! I know Janine´s experiments in her laboratory:) and she prompted you to go into your lab and try this out...that is cool and love the results. Anxiously awaiting what you will now do with these sheets.

Jeany said...

hahaa, yes I'm curious what you made with them, cool to see that you also have bin adicted, LOL, and thank you for naming my blog too. ☺ But I've one question, what is glassine? is that a fabric?
Can't wait to see your work, so... see you.. tomorrow. Have a great weekend,
Hugs from Janine

Anonymous said...

I've not used crayons for a long time, certainly since blogging but you have made me re-evaluate them. Yes, I might well dig them out and see what I come up with.
Always inspirational.
Wishes
Lynne

Deb (dcorder) said...

Cool!!!

Ali Manning said...

Wow - this looks like a messy but fun project!