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.