Tutorial: Crayon Monoprinting + Faux Batik Paper

This is a great technique to get some “fancy” papers for card making and collage.  This is a fun project to do with you kids, just remember to carefully supervise them.  It is also a great lesson in mixing colors and it involves one of my favorite things: melting stuff!
Supplies:

• Warming tray (vintage from the thrift store, pretty common and usually in almost mint condition)
• aluminum foil
• crayons
• exacto knife
• oven mitts (not your good ones, the ratty old ones in the drawer)
• paper towels
• white paper or cardstock
• black water color paint or extremely watered down black acrylic paint and brush

Plug in the warming tray and it will immediately start heating up.  Cover the top of the tray with a sheet of aluminum foil, smooth the foil down, the flatter the better.  Once the tray is hot start drawing designs with your crayons, I used my exacto knife to cut the wrappers off.  Draw slowly, you want a generous amount of wax on the aluminum foil.  For a solid print with no white from the paper showing through you will need large pools of wax.  For an open design (we’ll talk more about that in a minute), a heavy handed scribble is perfect.  For splotches of color use your exacto knife or an old pencil sharpener to shave off small bits of wax from a variety of colors.
Once you are happy with you design put on you oven mitts and smooth the paper down on top of the hot wax.  Be careful, that tray gets hotter than you would think, I can’t imagine using it to keep food warm, can you say scorched?  You will be able to see the design absorbing into the paper, you can rub the back of the paper with you oven mitt to make sure as much wax as possible has transferred.  Carefully peel paper off of tray, starting from a corner.
Set paper aside to cool, it won’t take long.  I like to make another print to help remove the leftover wax and then I use a paper towel to clean the rest of the residue off of the foil.  I found that I could reuse the foil for about three designs before the colors just got too muddy.  When that happens, just peel the dirty foil off and smooth on a new sheet of foil, don’t forget to put those oven mitts on!
The printed paper is finished, I liked how the solid colored pages looked, but I wasn’t so excited about the ones where I could see the paper peeking through and although I liked the crayon shaving prints they really didn’t pop.  The answer is to turn these papers into faux batik paper.
Load a wet brush up with black watercolor or thinned acrylic and start painting.  The black will cover all the white peeking through and the wax resists the paint!  I loved the results and now we have two different, but similar, beautiful papers to craft with.