Batik

Hey everyone!

I totally meant to post this earlier as I did this a while ago, but I learned how to do batik on rice paper earlier with Nikki. I was away on a college visit recently, so forgive me if this seems a little messy; I'm still a tiny bit exhuasted from the trip, but I'm ready to get back at it.

I have a very difficult time describing the process, but I will do as best as I can to explain it. It isn't too complicated, however it can be a little messy and it also depends on what the artist hopes to achieve from it. What we first did was get some sort of simple picture or sketch to be traced with a black marker onto the rice paper. Simplicity mattered in this case because the process would get extra messy if the design was complicated. At this stage, you could also add certain details like a border or a signature, which is what I did. I then painted wax over all the places where I had drawn something over the wax paper, so I had wax traced over my drawing, the border and my signature. I also spattered the wax all over the paper to give it a cool affect, but this is also not necessary. After finishing with the wax, I water-colored the paper to suit the drawing and when I was finished, I used a hair dryer to dry up the whole paper. After this, I painted a few layers of wax (Nikki explained that more wax was better) over the entire paper. When finished with the wax, the paper had to be placed somewhere cold, so I left it in the fridge for a while so that the wax would solidify. After a few minutes, I took the paper out and crumpled it up a few times (and this gets really messy, as the wax falls off of the paper). Since the paper was still covered in wax, we sort of had to iron the wax off by placing the paper between newspapers and ironing it that way, as the newspapers pick up excess wax. When all of the wax is completely removed, the batik is finished. Below is my finished product (the process was really messy, so I didn't get a chance to take many pictures while I was making this).

Nikki was kind enough to get a frame for it, so I'm very grateful for that. Doing batik on paper is very different from doing it on fabric, and so I have been looking into this since I was planning on trying this out for a scarf. However, there is the possibility that this might be too complicated for this project, so I have been looking into other simple DIY projects to do instead. I have also been working on the photograph pattern as well and am waiting to get some advice from another expert that I know. I will probably be posting again soon, so thank you for reading!

Larissa :)