Chalk Techniques

Chalks are a wonderful way to add soft, subtle color to your stamped projects. Chalks are easy to apply, blend, erase… yes, erase. You cannot make a permanent mistake with chalks as they are erasable. There are several, very easy techniques you can use to make very beautiful cards and scrapbook pages.

You can buy special chalks for scrapbooking and rubber stamping, but chalks are all generally the same, and you can use any chalks you have on hand. They sell inexpensive chalks in the office/stationary department of most large stores. You can also purchase chalk pastels in your craft stores, some quite inexpensively. They make special chalk applicators especially for this medium, or you can use whatever you have on hand, such as Q-tips, cotton balls, or paint brushes. They also make special chalk erasers, but I have found that regular pencil erasers work just fine in most cases.

The first method most people learn is to take a chalk applicator and color in their stamped images. This is a very easy technique and coloring in the lines is optional, so if you are not perfect, no one will know. If you do not like the messy look and you do color outside the lines, you can simply erase the chalk that was applied in the wrong place.

You can use a large applicator, such as a cotton ball to use chalks to color in your entire background. If you are doing this, you may want to stamp first, then color the background in. Then you can leave as is or take off chalk with an eraser to get a negative chalk effect.

Try taking your embossing pad and stamp your design, then go over the design with the chalks. They will stick to the embossing ink as well as embossing powder does.

You can take a wet paintbrush and paint your chalk on for darker, more vibrant colors. If you are using this method, make sure the dye you use on your stamped image is a pigment ink that will not smear or smudge.
You can also take your chalks to enhance parts of your project, such as embossed details or torn paper edges.

One of the greatest ways chalks can be used it to scrape a bit of chalk powder into a bit of water. You can then dye your paper or even ribbon with the chalk.

If you have a wonderful design , for example, and want to put a bit of matching ribbon on it but don’t have the color, simply take a piece of white ribbon and dye it using a chalk color from your project. You will now have a very coordinated finished product.