Yesterday I made some art for the house!

I used a die cut to make something called an elastic square out of posterboard.  Basically... it folds to look like a top of a box.  You can do the same thing by hand by scoring the lines you want to fold.

Then I attached some of that really cheap brown paper towel that you find at schools.  This way the crayon would have something to latch onto, instead of slick posterboard.  That's right, folks, crayon!

For the sunflower pictures, what I did was draw it first with crayon, then shave wax off of the crayons with a scissor blade. Then I pressed the wax where I wanted it to go with another paper towel.  Without that compression, it would just fly away when I used the heat gun.   While I melted it with the heat gun, I used a pencil to move the wax where I wanted it to go, and make sharper lines.

As for the portrait of Van Gogh... as you can tell, I'm no V.G.!  For starters, I have both of my ears, yet!  I tried the wax thing for him, but melting it distorted the shapes too much, so I moved to tempera paint, applied with a pencil, to get that really nice texturing that you see in Van Gogh's work.

It actually does look pretty great, but the pictures  blur the details.  This picture does it slightly more justice. You can sort of see the texturing and all of the different shades in the portrait!

Happy arting!