Watercolor Crayons & PALM FRONDS SILHOUETTE L791

What do today's art samples have in common?

All were printed with 9" x 12" Palm Fronds Silhouette L791--

-- and the horizontal orange one has an under-print made with my 6" x 6" stencil Mimosa 6.

The other commonality is that each of today's art samples received a top layer made with watercolor crayons after having been printed with acrylic paints.

But on most of these pieces, there was also a middle layer -- a glaze (a mixture of mostly gloss gel medium liquid, a little acrylic paint, and very little water.)  

After brushing this glaze over a print, I would go over the surface while it was still wet, creating texture.  One texture-maker was a children's toy, a soft and somewhat flexible plastic building block:

This humble art-making tool has been in service for years, and has the surface cracks to prove it!  Its shape makes it easy to grip from above, while the bottom is pressed into wet acrylics, glazes or even modeling paste.

The texture that this tool created in my still-wet glazes -- once they had dried -- created a surface with "tooth," meaning its roughness would hold onto media in a different way than a smooth surface.

I took advantage of this by using watercolor crayons to lay in color across the now-dry, newly textured surfaces.

On some of today's art samples, I called it a finish, once I'd covered the surface with crayon; for example --

Above, the individual crayon marks remain clearly visible, letting the viewer know for certain that crayons were used.

On other pieces, I went one step farther, using a water-wet brush to go over the crayons marks:

You can click on the above to enlarge it and better see details in the upper left.

The photo above shows how the wet brush caused some of the crayon markings to melt into a pale glaze, which others (because crayon had been caught on rough ridges of texture) retained some of the darker color.

The result, as shown earlier of this post, is an artwork with dark blue areas that gently bleed into areas covered with a veil of light blue:

I use a variety of watercolor crayons that include Caran D'ache, Stabilo Woodies, Gelatos and Art Bars.   The reason I keep such a wide range on hand is that each brand's crayons have somewhat different qualities; for example, Gelatos are really soft whereas Art Bars are really brittle.  Each can be used to advantage, depending on the art project at hand as well as the results the artist is looking for.  

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