Sgraffito Playtime

Not one but two blog awards today... woo hoo! Thanks go to Neet and Cath for nominating me and I'll do the honours tomorrow! Should be fun!

Last night I escaped from World Cup Fever, to have a play, as the constant noise of the hooters was driving me bananas. I don't need an excuse but this was a great reason to get away from TV! 

Recently I had been thinking of so many painting techniques from childhood so I decided to try out some of them. My first idea is simple Sgraffito, a technique where the top layer of colour is removed to reveal a plain contrast colour from below. 

This technique is used in ceramics and painting, amongst other fields, and far can be more involved, but I stuck with the simple form we used to do in school ?$2%!!? years ago.

First I covered a piece of card very heavily by scribbling and rubbing a piece of white chalk over it for quite a while.

Then I rubbed and scribbled over the chalk with coloured wax crayons covering the whole white area.

I then stamped images onto the back of the coloured card.

I laid the coloured card face down onto a clean piece of white card with the stamped image on the top and secured these two cards to my work table with masking tape.

With an old ball point pen,(a small ball tool can also be used),  I drew over the images, pressing quite firmly.

Here's an example.....

When finished, the separate cards had the images transferred. A positive image and a negative image, both usable.

I then decided to stamp at random over the images, with the same stamps, before I made cards from the results.

Easy to see the positive and negative here

This one below looks as though I made it at school!! but it's good to share warts and all!

These swirls were also sprayed with glimmer Mists and will make good backgrounds.

Here I used black wax crayon over the coloured crayons for greater contrast but the colour still shows through.

Over all I think the technique will make good backgrounds if applied quite delicately but I don't think I'd use it again for focal images. It was all good fun and got me back into experimenting which I haven't done for a while.