BIG CARDS – 10 Spades

23/04/2012 by UKMA 2 Comments

A while back I did an article for SI using crayons.  I’ve always meant to play further with them.  Today I did.  My first obstacle was not being able to find my black paint.  With Easter just gone, I had the idea to make a sort of scratch card effect, a bit like the Ukrainian eggs you may have seen.  But I could NOT lay my hands on my black acrylic paint.  I tried a few other effects (the most interesting was pouncing Versafine black ink over the crayon-coloured background then stamping with an un-inked stamp to lift off the ink.  It was fine, maybe cool, but I just did not have the patience to let the ink fully dry and both a heat gun and an iron lifted off the ink from the waxy crayon) so I kept looking.  I finally found an unopened (!) bottle of MM black paint. So here is what I did.

First I covered my white card with crayon – shade of purple.  Just bog-standard Crayola.  I aimed for a nice thick coat and didn’t worry too much about having thicker coverage in some places.

I attempted the scratch-off effect, which totally worked – the idea was to paint over the crayon then stamp with black ink then scratch off along the lines to reveal the crayon colour.  All well and good, but there is a reason my mail-room lunch time Hearts-playing mates at work called me “Mary Anne with the shaky Hand.” I think it was just the wrong sort of stamps.  Anyway, then I had the idea to stamp with Versamark and emboss with clear embossing powder, over the crayon and see where that led me.

I worried what the heat gun would do to the crayon, but it worked fine. Then I carried on with the black paint, brayering it over the embossing.

The brayer lifts a bit of the paint off the embossing, and if you want a super muted look, you could stop there.  I carried on, using a not-to-damp baby wipe to whisk away more of the paint. Not scrubbing, a very light touch.

To make the number-name I coloured a scrap and then rubbed over the crayon with a paper stump, to really smooth and slightly blend the colour.  Ironing it between notebook pages works too.

I like the interesting effect of the pigment spread. I stamped over this with black paint and cut out the letters then attached.

I like the contrast between the matte paint and the shiny embossing, and the variation of the crayon strokes under the embossing. also the imperfect removal of the paint.

I feared working with black as a background would give me trouble, but actually I am finding the whole process really interesting.  I may ned to do an overview shot of all the cards again to see how I like them as a group and which ones I like best.  To be fair, that actually changes week to week, so it might be pointless.  Roll on NINE!