FOG Tuesday – Creating with Crayola™

I’ve said this before when discussing our FOG Tuesday activities, but it bears repeating, “Who knew that a group of women could have so much fun for an entire day...with a shiny new pack of Crayola™ crayons, some fabric, paper, heat guns, rubbing plates and more?” Well we were those women last Tuesday at FOG.

It started with a short show and tell of some things that Jan and I had tried before the session and ended the day with a myriad of brightly coloured and very creative pieces, some requiring some additional embellishments, and some nothing more.

Methods seemed to group into direct application of crayon to surfaces, or the application of the crayon to a surface that was then transferred to another surface.

Sandpaper Transfer

A technique that has been around for some time, though new to me, was to draw images onto sandpaper with the crayons and then heat transfer to another surface, in this case fabric. Donna did a great piece and I think that the sandpaper image is a keeper as well. It was interesting to note that in some of the samples we tried before the session we found that the wax residue in fabric crayons tended to melt into the surrounding fabric causing a ghosting image, while the Crayola™ crayons did not.

Wax Paper and Melted Crayons

Diane and I attempted another tried-and-true application and that was to grate/break crayons onto folded wax paper and melt with an iron. These created stained glass type pieces that I think will work well as the front to cards or perhaps journal pages.

Coloured Fusible Web 
and Crayon Rubbing

Jan came up with an idea to colour the sticky side of fusible webbing with the crayons. She then put that piece over a rubbing plate, rubbed an image onto the fabric and then fused it to a piece of fabric. Her rubbing plates were from Scholar's Choice™ though similar ones can be purchased from Cedar Canyon Textiles™. 

Shalinder did a piece based on this method and used punchinella to create some additional surface texture to her piece. The fabric she used had raised metallic motifs which added a lot to the overall effect.

This technique left the fabric with a nice hand which will make it great to use as a base for additional hand work, beading, embroidery etc.

Metallic Motif, Crayon Rubbing, Punchinella Design

Melted Wax and Mono-prints

Karen used her heat gun to melt crayons directly to some canvas and then pulled crayon mono-prints from the melted wax. 

I think that there will be more exploration of this technique by all of us.

Melting wax in a protective box.

Debbie utilized a box to melt broken crayons to a canvas and then stamped into the wax with a large red rubber stamp. Just a side note - if you are grating or breaking crayons to melt use a box to contain the bits as they are easily blown all over the place with your heat tool. (You can ask my sister if you don’t believe me.)

If you are interested in a fun craft to do with your kids (or adults) Crayola™ now has a new set of crayons called Crayola Meltdown Art Set™. Adult supervision required.

Sandpaper transfer and
Tsukineko™ Fabric Inks

Chris did a lovely fall themed piece using several painterly techniques, though the base piece started with a sandpaper transfer that you can just see below the surface.

We didn’t reinvent the wheel, but we had a great time colouring it!

Until next time...Meredith and Jan

Image Transfers

We played with Image Transfers earlier in 2013 but our session last Tuesday took our exploits to a frenetic level. There are so many interesting techniques available to fibre and mixed media artists today and I think that we tried them all.

To the uninitiated, try one technique at a time – you’re less likely to feel faint by the end of your session J Generally speaking Image Transfers can be categorized under a few headings:

• those that require images printed from an ink jet printer
• those that require images printed from a toner based laser printer or copier (coloured or black and white)
• images that need to be reversed prior to transferring the image to a substrate (especially if words are involved)
• images that require a medium of some sort to complete the transfer, for example a gel medium, acrylic paint, packing tape or solvent

The burning question for some of these techniques is “Why wouldn’t you just transfer the image directly to the fabric using the inkjet printer?” Our findings would conclude that, “It’s an effect that you are going for, i.e. vintage, distressed, ethereal etc.”

Top Left - Citrasolv™ onto crinoline
Top Right - TAP™ onto crinoline
Bottom Left - packing tape
Bottom Right - TAP™ onto distressed dryer sheet

For example, you could print that photo of Great Aunt Doll directly onto cotton muslin using your ink jet printer, sizing it the way you want and not have to reverse the photo before printing. Fabric is OK, but what if you could manipulate the photo digitally, reverse the photo and print the image on to Transfer Artist Paper™ (TAP), distress the TAP and then transfer the image to metal, wood or glass? The possibilities may leave you gob smacked!

CitraSolv™ Toner Based
Transfer to Linen

Image Transfer Techniques that we tried: Citrasolv™ (solvent based transfer with toner copies), packing tape or contact paper using magazine photos, ink jet printed transparencies, either direct to your surface fresh and wet from the printer OR onto the rough side of a transparency and let to dry. This transfer is then completed with spray hand sanitizer. We also tried, or had demonstrated, gel medium transfers to Textiva™, fabric and travertine tiles.

TAP™ onto painted Lutradur™

TAP™ – transfer artist paper is somewhat in a league of its own. Images can be put onto TAP™ with an ink jet printer, rubber stamps, Crayola™ wax crayons, Portfolio Water Soluble Oil Pastels™, pencil etc. 

Images are transferred using an iron and can be transferred to many substrates: fabric, paper, glass, wood, metal, mica, distressed dryer sheets, crinoline…just remember that you must reverse images or text.

Imagine the possibilities with a kid’s art class! 

Gel Medium transfer to Textiva™

One final word on any of these processes – make certain that you use your own images or ones that are guaranteed to be copy right or royalty free, especially if you are planning to sell your masterpieces!

TAP™ - Image drawn with Crayola Wax
Crayons™  and transferred to white cotton.

TAP™ - Image drawn with Portfolio Water Soluble
Oil Pastels™ and transferred to canvas.

FOG Tuesday - Citrasolv™

I’m a little behind in posting a blog about our activities of June 11. We welcomed two new members to the group and had a great day altering magazine pages with Citrasolv™. The resulting pages are quite interesting and have, so far, retained the lovely light lemony scent of the Citrasolv™. We have talked about Citrasolv™ in a previous post when were using it for image transfers.

Choose magazine pages that are full of colour, as they seem to work the best. National Geographic magazine has been touted as the best magazine to work with, though the year of publication and the inks that were used at that time did seem to have some bearing on the outcome of our altered pages. I used pages from a local arts magazine and those worked very well.

The Citrasolv™ works by dissolving the inks on the page, most notably black, so text pages will just end up a muddy mess. Liberally apply the Citrasolv™ to the pages making sure that you have layers of newspaper beneath as well as a plastic covering for your work surface. The solvent will eat through certain types of vinyl gloves so try to find “nitrile” gloves, as they are a synthetic rubber with no latex. Also use glass containers for the solvent and natural bristle brushes.

Layer your pages face to face to that the magic starts to happen and wait for about 20 minutes before you peek. Be prepared for a lot of patience after painting your pages with the solvent as it does take some time for the inks to start to move.

Peel apart your pages and set out to dry. Once they are dry you can use stencils, cotton swabs, more solvent or alcohol based hand wipes and continue to alter the pages as seen in the photos to the left.

Citrasolv™ has become a mainstay in the tool kits for mixed media artists and they even have an Artist’s Section on their website.

Image Transfer Techniques

February FOG day was devoted to working on a "Valentine's" themed project, using something that was heat embossed with embossing powders. We worked on these in the morning and in the afternoon we experimented with just a few of the myriad of image transfer techniques.

One of these is the packing tape/clear contact paper transfer, a simple, easy and inexpensive transfer method. Find an image in a magazine that you want to transfer and cover the right side of the image with a piece of the packing tape, sticky side down on the image. 

Next, soak for a short time in a bowl of water. Once it is wet begin in the centre and with your thumbs or fingers start rolling the magazine paper from the back of the tape until only the image is left. The really interesting thing about this type of transfer is that there is no white colour applied to a magazine page, so when you remove the paper, you are left with clear tape.

 

Two other methods that we tried were:

Artist Transfer Paper by Lesley Riley 

Citra Solv