Greetings friends. I hope you are having a wonderful weekend. Today I want to show you a technique for creating a chalk background. Every time I do it, I get vastly different results.
To make the backgrounds, take a small pan of water and scrape some chalk or chalk pastels onto the water using a popsicle stick. Use as many colors as you like to coat the water surface with chalk dust. If your chalk is more “clumpy,” you will get more speckles on the finished paper. If you have smooth dust, you will have a smoother pattern of color:
Press your cardstock down into the water. You will get a darker look on the front of your paper and a more marbled look on the backside of the paper. Here are the fronts of some papers I made:
Here are the backsides of the papers:
You get vastly different looks from one piece of paper submerged into the water.
Notes- I didn’t swirl the chalks on top of the water before dipping my paper because it makes the chalks sink. Other mediums work better for marbling. The chalks give you more of an airbrushed or graffiti look. I ended up spraying some of my papers with a matte sealant because the chalk was rubbing off of the dried paper. I had vastly different results depending on the brand of chalk. Some chalks adhered better.
Here is a close up of the card I made with one of my backgrounds:
I wanted the background to be the focal point of the card, so I cut out my flowers using black cardsock to look like a silhouettes. White didn’t show up as well as black on my particular background.
For extra pizazz, I added a layer of black glitter paper and added some black glitter paper to the centers of my flowers.
I hope you will give the technique a try. It is a lot of fun.
