Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Neocolor II



That was the theme of a swap on Arts in the Mail - these are art crayons which are water soluable, and the swap idea was simply to use them in some way on your postcards. After a little research and whatnot I decided I would try to use them for some monoprinting - I think they came out fairly well. Did a journal quilt with the same technique while I was at it.

Here's a photo of the glass plate with the crayon on - I think you could probably draw your design with the crayons dry and then mist it with a spray bottle, but I've not done it that way - I just dipped the tip of the crayon in water and coloured as I went along. The secret is to make the plate pretty wet before you try to transfer the colours - if it's at all dry, they just stay on the plate and don't move to the fabric.

Because it's a monoprint and only works once by definition, I made all of mine fairly different, but I didn't bother to take photos of them all in construction.

Once the design was on the plate, I placed the fabric over and smoothed it out to come into contact with the glass (left below). Right below shows the fabric after the print has been made.



After printing, I added free motion stitching to emphasize the shapes and then a few embellishments - I think they work fairly well. The journal quilt was printed twice - not from the same print, but I did colour them similarly. It's not a technique I'd want to use on a huge area as it's a bit time consuming, but it works nicely for postcards. There are tons of other things you can do with the crayons, so I will definitely experiment again in future.

4 comments:

Gina said...

That looks fun - I've used neocolour crayons to draw directly on to fabric but never like that before. Another thing to add to my list!

Carol said...

Hia Kate, are the crayons, like water soluable pencils??? Or special crayons like the kids have?

Anonymous said...

mmmm looking forward to one of these babies dropping thru my letterbox!

Anonymous said...

The cube card arrived safely - great technique, these crayons are really versatile - delicious - thanks Kate