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..........