Tutorial Blitz!

Okay - ask and ye shall receive. Or, even if you don't ask - you still might receive! I'm having so much fun with my crayon rubbing technique that I thought I would share a little step by step with ya. Someone on SCS said my blue version looked "dreamlike" so I thought I would add the "dream" greeting to this one as a little inside joke. This and the blue one are headed off to Stampin' Up! for contest entries this month. I promise the colors are more vivid and beautiful in person.

Now when prepping for this project, I was looking at my Riding Hood Red Ink Pad (go ahead and get that out now - you'll need it) and I noticed that in French, the name is "Rouge Capulet". Does that mean Juliet's last name was Riding Hood? Do you think Romeo's last name was "Big Bad Wolf"??? These are the crazy thoughts that enter my head in my all-too-short stamping sessions, my people!

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah - this card! Isn't it beautiful??? Well here's how you make it.

Step 1 - go to Convention.

Step 2 - Get the Inspired by Nature stamp set. If you didn't go, then just order it from me! :)

Lay it down, rubber side up on your work surface.

Place a thin piece of paper on top of it - printer paper is perfect.

Take a black crayon and rub the side of the crayon in one direction, down the surface of the paper until the image is saturated to your liking. Experiment with darker and lighter impressions until you find your happy place. My happy place is anywhere where there are crayons, paper, ink, etc.

The reason you want to go in just one direction is that switching direction leads to stray marks, little scratches of color where you don't want them and general stamping voodoo.

Don't worry if there are a few places where you get little dots of wax from the crayon. This completely makes it look like you are a professional artist, who uses words like "gouache" and "encaustic" and actually knows what they mean!

With practice, you'll be living in a studio on the side of a hill in Santa Fe talking about vortexes and eating only organic lavendar.

Anyway, after you get the image as dark as you want it, fire up your brayer. Use the soft tan roller. Ink it up in Summer Sun and cover your image.

I would use a light touch at first. You can always go back and saturate it more, but you can't remove the color once it's down.

Next you will brayer over this with Riding Hood Red. Use a very gentle touch after you get the brayer inked up with the red. If you want it to look like my sample, you will want there to be some voids in the red ink layer, so tread lightly and go over it several times.

Brayer in the same direction each time - so if you start horizontal, stay horizontal. If you're rolling up or down the paper vertically, do only that.

After you get your red layer down, feel free to go back with summer sun and really make the yellow vivid. The summer sun on top of the Riding Hood Red really brightens the whole image up.

The paper takes on that cool soft finish when it's all saturated with ink.

For expert brayering advice, please see Michelle Zindorf's Blog.

After you get the image all sassy and perfect, adhere it to the front of a Basic Black card. Then, I used Kristina Werner's tip about cutting a slit in the spine of the card to slip a ribbon through. The copy paper is too thin to be able to tie a ribbon around, so this technique was perfect for this card. I used that dark grey taffeta ribbon, although it looks sort of brown in my pictures. I used a Basic Black marker to color just the word "dream" from the NEW Hostess Set - Happiness Always and huffed and stamped my greeting with that.

I hope you enjoy trying this crayon technique on your own - we will be playing with this at my open house this weekend - let me know if you'd like to come!!

And if you want to see the WORLD'S QUEEN OF ART AND CRAYON RUBBINGS, plus just a wonderful lady's thoughts, check out Michelle Ward's Blog. I linked my humble creation to one of her Crusades for the Street Team Blog which I'm COMPLETELY addicted to!!!

Have a great Wednesday!!