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Idea of the Month

Wax Paper Brayering

Do you love your brayer?  You will after you try out this exciting technique!  Just follow the simple steps below.

Step 1- Iron on the Wax Paper!

Heat up your iron (hot, no steam), and lay a paper towel onto your ironing board.  Place a piece of glossy cardstock face up onto the paper towel.  Cut or tear off a piece of wax paper a bit bigger than your glossy cardstock, and crinkle it up into a tight ball.  Unroll it and flatten it out as best you can.  (Hint:  The more you crinkle the wax paper, the more texture will appear in your final design, so you might want to crinkle and unroll it a couple times).  Place the crinkled and sort-of-flat wax paper over the glossy cardstock and cover everything with another paper towel.  Iron the whole thing about 5 seconds or until the wax is melted onto the cardstock.  Remove the wax paper and discard (you can't use this piece again).  Cool.

Step 2- Brayer It!

Now, just ink up your rubber brayer with your choice of ink (regular, dye-based inks work great), and roll color over the wax paper until it's as dark as you'd like.  As you roll, you will see the texture appear as the melted wax "resists" the ink.   Set aside to let the ink dry.  Now, these pieces are good to use for layering.  But it gets really fun when you use this technique to actually texturize your stamped images... read on!

Step 3-  A Fun Option: Texturize a Stamped Image!

The process is pretty much the same, EXCEPT you need to stamp your image onto the glossy cardstock BEFORE you iron (like I did the flower in the photo above)!  This is important.  If you iron first, the stamp will not stamp correctly (remember: the wax acts to resist the ink...).  So, stamp FIRST, and then proceed as in Step 1 to crinkle the wax paper and iron it onto the glossy cardstock.  

Step 4- Brayer, Cut and Assemble!

Now, go ahead and brayer your image using your choice of ink colors.  But of course it's one color, right?  If you want your design to be more than 1 color (such as if I wanted the flower center to be yellow), I would need to repeat this process and brayer the next flower in yellow.  Then I  just cut out my pieces and assemble, as you see in the final photo above.

 Have fun experimenting!

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