Hand Made Cards Made Easy!…

Have you ever thought about making your own cards? If you ever received any hand made cards yourself, you will appreciate that it is a nice, personal gesture. Therefore join me by getting artistic and learning how to make wax resist cards.

So okay, what are the basic requirements needed for this? A No 6 brush, some silver or gold paint, scissors, 2 H pencil, a glue stick like Pritt, as an example, watercolour paints, childrens wax crayons and some pieces of A5 card.

You need a card that the wax crayons will work on. Ideally one with a surface that appears chalky, but also has a slight texture to it. Naturally, if it is stiff, the result will be better as you need to be able to fold it in half.

If you are lucky, you can sometimes purchase ready made blank greeting cards, but this is not always possible, so this is an alternative method. Your local printer will sometimes sell and cut down A3 paper to A5 for you and this may work out to be a cheaper option.

Into action now! Take a piece of your A5 card and cut a piece into two halves widthways. You then need to draw your image in the centre. Any image you make needs to be clear, so that you are then able to cut it out. Your image needs to be something whereby you can cut out segments and they have to be outlined clearly to be possible to cut them out to give you a stencil.

Take your scissors and start cutting out your stencils. Once you have your stencils assembled, you can glue them on to the other card piece. These will appear now like a raised picture. Taking a piece of A5 card and fold it in half widthways to make your card with your stuck image in the middle of this.

So really, what you have now, is your template. Take your crayons and rub over the card surface. The raised shapes that you have, will catch the colour of your image underneath. It is important that you hold the card and template firm and steady, while you work on it. If you move even slightly it could mar your work.

Presumably you have reached this point, continue with another crayon by rubbing the side of this all over your card front. It will then show up the colours that are underneath. You can make these even stronger by pressing harder.

Not all crayons will make the same marks, it really depends on how much pressure is used and where. Get your watercolours out and mix a pretty watery mix. Paint a circle or square around your work with your gold or silver paint. This then enables you to wash over your other work with a No 6 brush, filling in any spaces.

Whatever you do, don`t overdo the paint on your image, it needs to be watery so that you achieve fairly transparent colours.