Crayon Resist Snowflake Art
by Deborah Harju, posted on December 20th, 2013 in Art School
Snow, the exciting, magical, fluffy component to winter’s cold temperatures. I hear from those who live where snow is expected each winter that the first snow of the season is the best. A blanket of white. And I must admit, when we travel in wintertime for our annual ski and snowboard trip, it doesn’t get much better than when it snows during our vacation. Today we are going to learn a bit about snowflakes and then create our own.
Snow falls from the clouds in the form of flakes that are crystalline water ice, which means little ice parts. Ice parts? Well why doesn’t snow hurt when it falls on us? Well, the structure of snow is open and fluffy so it doesn’t hurt like hail which is hard because it’s melted and refrozen. Would you like to know the largest snowflake ever recorded? It was in Montana back in 1887 and the snowflake measured 15 inches wide! Let’s take a look at some gorgeous photographs of real snowflakes. And let’s take note of the number of “arms” you see.
Gorgeous right? And did you notice the number of arms? Yes, they all have six! The crystalline structure of ice is six-fold which means that snowflakes grow six “arms.” Let’s keep that in mind when we create our own snowflakes today. You’ll need a white or light colored crayon, paper, watercolors, a pencil(optional) and a brush in water.
Depending on the size of your paper you can divide your sheet into several boxes with a pencil, or just leave your paper whole without lines if you’d like a single snowflake on the page. Take your crayon and draw a snowflake, it’ll be a little hard to see at first, so if you’d like to sketch it on a scratch piece of paper first that’s fine.
We are experimenting today with a method called crayon resist. Crayon and watercolor don’t really like each other, so you’ll see the crayon resist that watercolor! Next you’ll choose a watercolor and brush over the whole page or section, if you divided your paper. Your snowflake will appear! We discovered that the harder you press with your crayon the better the effect. You can see the difference in this photo between the light blue and the hot pink. It’s pretty obvious which one we pressed the crayon harder.
If you have divided your paper up into sections you can choose a different color for each snowflake. Or do a solo snowflake all in it’s own color. I can just imagine a whole wall filled with these indoor snowflakes!
