What can be engraved. DIY color engraving for children's creativity

creative pursuits- an integral part of the upbringing and education of the child. There are many types art where kids of all ages can create. For example, engraving for children is a technique that can be mastered as early as three years old. But such creativity will also be interesting for teenagers and parents.

Engraving as a form of visual art

Very often this creative technique is put on a par with fine arts. Indeed, these varieties of creativity have enough in common. Crafts in the engraving technique involves removing the protective layer using a special tool - a spatula or pen. Today on sale you can find ready-made kits for creating such a masterpiece. An alternative option is to do the craft from and to with your own hands. Let's consider this technique in detail and try to understand why engraving is useful for children?

Ready-made kits for factory-made creativity

Today in any toy or stationery store you can find a wide variety of sets for children's creativity. There are among them those that are intended to be created. Usually, such a set includes a basis for creating a three-dimensional pattern, a special spatula / engraver and instructions. Under a black background, a white or colored base can be hidden. For ease of use, usually the lines to be drawn with the tool are already marked in color on a black base. The cost of the Engraving for Children set ranges from 100-500 rubles. It all depends on the size and complexity of the drawing. Please note: the recommended age must be indicated on the packaging young artist. For the little ones choose simple pictures small in size, and for older children and adults - more complex. Attention! At the age of 3-5 years, kids are recommended to make engravings only in collaboration with adults. The task of parents is to tell about this creativity for children, show the basic techniques and control the whole process.

Making an engraving using a candle

If you want to make a set for creativity no worse than in a store, you can do it yourself at home. To do this, take a cardboard picture, you can use, for example, a page from a torn book. Cut out the base to the right size. Next, rub it with a regular candle or a piece of paraffin. The layer should be even and uniform. Then cover the workpiece with a thick layer of gouache without adding water. Leave to dry for several hours. After that, your engraving for children is ready, you can start creating. Invite the child to clear the whole picture or some of its individual elements. You can also take an ordinary piece of cardboard, paint it arbitrarily with paints, and then cover it with wax and gouache. It is more convenient to draw pictures on such an engraving without completely removing the paint.

How to make an engraving with your own hands without wax or paraffin?

If you do not have a candle at home, you should not be upset. Take cardboard or a sheet of thick paper and paint the base well with these pencils, and on top, as in the first method, apply gouache and dry. Another option involves the use of a finished picture and film. Ordinary packing bags, file folders or thin plastic packaging will do. Glue a piece of film to the base with a glue stick, apply gouache on top and dry. Making engravings is also possible from glossy pictures. And this is one of the most simple ways. Take a page from a magazine, a coloring book cover, or some other glossy picture. Apply gouache directly on it and after complete drying, start creating. Preschoolers are advised to use thin tools when creating engravings and try to hold them like a pencil or pen - this will help to adapt the hand to writing.

The benefits of this type of creativity

Children's prints are interesting and very useful crafts. This type of creativity develops fine motor skills, teaches the child to be attentive and diligent. If you use a purchased set, the baby learns to trace and draw the correct lines. Many kids love homemade engraving bases that don't have markings on them. When working with such material, each time you have to guess what is hidden under the paint and where it should be erased. Interesting and arbitrary drawing on the basis to create an engraving with a multi-colored background. Try to create with your child, using both ready-made kits and homemade ones. Remember that the finished craft can be a wonderful interior decoration or great gift on a holiday to one of the relatives.

Creativity for children is a limitless possibility of self-expression and development. Never forget this and try to regularly make a variety of decorative crafts with your daughter or son.

Svetlana Bolshakova

Recently, going through my old notes from the courses, I found two printed sheets, two old engravings.

This engraving made of cardboard

And here, in addition to cardboard, lace is used

We were shown techniques for working with prints, preparing clichés for printing engravings. Then I really liked this technique. The matter was approaching March 8 and I decided to do it with the guys for moms postcard engraving. I made the cliche myself from cardboard, and the children only painted with gouache and made an impression on paper. Cardboard quickly soaked, flaked and fell into disrepair. Preparatory work seemed difficult to me and more I engraving did not return to work with children. But, finding old leaves with engravings I wanted to remember how it's done.

Engraving on cardboard(from the French gravure) - cut, create a relief - a kind of print. A relief imprint of a seal is made with the help of an application, made up of individual cardboard elements. The thickness of the cardboard must be at least 2 mm. Engraving came from jewelry. She is very multifaceted: linocut, metal engraving, engraving on cardboard, woodcut, lithography. There are many ways to take impressions from natural objects: leaves, feathers, flowers. Grating is an imitation engravings.

I want to show you how to engraving on cardboard. I took 2 identical cardboard boxes 11x15 cm.

I cut out a frame from one and glued it to the second, although this is not necessary

I decided to make a vase with flowers, cut out a vase and some elements for it

I cut out flowers, their centers, leaves and parts of leaves.

All glued to the base

I decided to take burgundy gouache

But I didn't like it.

Painted black

Strongly pressed when stroking with fingers on the left, again not that

Painted again and made a print. Well, now you can stick it on paper and insert it into a frame

But my cliche got wet after three times and the elements began to delaminate

In searching for material on this topic on the Internet, I found recommendations for working with children using polystyrene and ceiling tiles. This is what we did yesterday with my corn-lover guests. (I talked about this in a previous post) - engraving using polystyrene - a substrate for vegetables. I had one such "bowl" of mushrooms, I cut it, first I tried it on my granddaughters

My gouache is good, professional and it is not necessary to dilute it with water. And children's gouache needs to be diluted to the density of sour cream. The first impression may not work, but the second one will be better. Such a print will never get wet and children will be able to draw a picture on their own. ballpoint pen, paint over with gouache and make an impression

We littered the gouache in vain, the drawing is not very clearly visible.

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Today in specialized stores you can find a lot of different sets for children's creativity: educational, educational, just entertaining. Such toy products attract the attention of children, but it is much more interesting to create something similar with their parents, thereby learning all the secrets of the creative process.

And in fact, many children's creative kits are nothing complicated that could not be reproduced on their own at home. For example, engravings familiar to many can be made with your own hands in just about half an hour. How? Let's find out.

For creating color engraving will need:

• white cardboard (not glossy);
• wax pencils different colors(you can also use oil pastels);
• black gouache (you can take another dark color);
• liquid soap;
• tassel;
• orange stick (or other thin and sharp object for engraving).

Step 1. Create a colored base-background

Most of the prints that are sold in stores are made with a single color background (gold or silver), and it will be more interesting for children to see the picture in different colors. To do this, we paint one side of the white matte cardboard in random order with multi-colored wax crayons- the more saturated and contrasting the colors, the more effective they will look when engraved. Note: instead of wax pencils you can use ordinary or felt-tip pens, but they will need to be additionally sketched on top with a paraffin candle, and only then proceed to the next step.

Step 2. Making an intermediate layer of engraving

To make a kind of "protective" invisible layer that will not allow you to erase the colored background when engraving, you will need liquid soap. It must be evenly applied to the background mosaic. Note: "rubbing" the soap into the pastel should be more careful, because the color can be "smeared", that is, transferred to a piece of paper of a different color.

Step 3. Apply the finishing layer for scratching

After the soap has soaked into the colored background of the cardboard, it is necessary to paint it tightly with thick black gouache. Even if in some places the paint will diverge from the wax, it is necessary to repeat painting until the background stops showing through. You can paint over both the entire sheet and part of it.

We are waiting for the gouache to dry, and our engraving is ready. (although it would be more correct to say scratching, which is only one of the varieties of engraving). Now you can pick up a thin pointed object (for example, an orange stick, a knitting needle, an empty pen rod, etc.) and start scratching a new masterpiece.

If you show an illustration like this one, with a motorcycle, made by Mark Summers, even in the circle of illustrators, almost no one will recognize the technique. Some will confidently say that it is drawn on a computer, they personally know the magic filter that will draw everything by itself. Some will say that it is all hand-drawn in black ink, imitating old engravings. And the most adult part, who still spent their youth with manual rather than digital tools, will condescendingly pat everyone on the virtual shoulder: puppies, this is a woodcut, I recognize it.

And they are all wrong :)

At first glance, it really looks like a woodcut. Where white is selected, where black drawing is left. Firstly, it is laborious to imitate this with ink, and secondly, it will still turn out badly, you need to draw with ink, as ink is supposed to - in black and white. These drawings are made in a technique similar to engraving.

Woodcut, indeed the oldest and most classic technique book illustration. I have a story about illustration techniques in the 19th century. In short, an end cut of a tree was taken so that the fibers were perpendicular to the drawing surface, polished, covered with white, an illustration drawing was applied on top and the engraver cut out the drawing. Everything that should have been black remained the surface of the wood, everything that was white deepened. If you had to make a thin black line, you had to remove the tree on both sides of it. If you have ever cut a linocut or stamp, you have a rough idea of ​​this technique.

The wooden piece became a printing stamp - paint was applied to it and printed on sheets future book. This is how Tenniel's illustrations for Alice were made. And here comes interesting thing. There are no "originals" for Alice. Tenniel came to the workshop to the engraver and drew on a piece of wood. The engraver then cut out everything superfluous so that a black drawing remained. Got it? Engraver.

The engraver determined exactly how the line would pass, how the shadow was determined, how elegantly or roughly the detail would be cut.

Nowadays, the closest profession to this is inker, a person who draws ink on a drawing for a comic book. Not all artists draw comics from start to finish on their own. Usually the artist draws a detailed pencil sketch and gives it to the inker. Inker circles everything with ink. He decides how black spot, where to put a semitone, with what pressure the line near the eye will be. If you ever went to a wood burning circle in a pioneer camp, you can imagine the scatter of results. If ten pioneers are given a drawing of a touching Bambi, carbon paper, a piece of plywood, and a burner, they will all burn (trace) the final drawing in different ways. Disney may not recognize his four-legged.

Therefore, what we see in the books with Alice is how the hand of the pioneer-burner engraver went. Maybe all these faces of an adult lady, with heavy painted eyes - just the engraver's choice?

In case you're wondering, this obscure hero was named Thomas Dalziel and came from a family of very popular engravers. Victorian era He even drew illustrations himself. So he couldn't completely spoil the illustrations with a wooden stroke. But this does not negate the fact that there are no paper, drawn originals for Alice. In the Oxford Museum, the originals are stored wooden blocks with a carved pattern, from which the first edition was printed. (To be more precise, the second. The first came out rough and dirty, the process required alterations and refinements, only the second satisfied Tenniel, and the first was sold in the second-rate market - in America.

Wood engraving gave a distinct black and white pattern (which metal engravings did not give) and these qualities, of course, still attract aesthetically. But cutting wood is difficult and requires skill. It seems stupid to give engravers your illustrations, it’s difficult to cut it yourself - and main question- why? In the pre-computer era, it is clear why - technically the drawing was printed from this board. Now, when everything is printed from digital forms, it would be necessary to print from wood onto paper, scan the paper - and transfer the drawing to print. And cut just to make a print?

Today, no one cuts wood for illustrations. The same effect can be achieved in a technique called scratchboard. It is 100% handmade, the process is basically the same as in wood engraving, but the "engraving board" is also a print, the final work.

See? The white lines are cut through, the black remains untouched as a background, looks exactly like a woodcut.

In fact, this is a specially prepared cardboard ("scratching board" in translation). A thick sheet of paper is covered with white clay, a substance with a chalky surface, and a thin layer of black paint, such as ink or ink, is applied over the white layer. The artist draws a design on a black surface, takes a sharp tool - usually one of the X-Acto knives - and scratches the surface like an engraver. With the tip of a knife it is easy to draw lines of any width, like a pen, to remove everything black, where it should be white, to hatch in parallel and cross and completely create the appearance of a wood engraving.

At the same time, if you made a mistake somewhere, you can cover this area with ink and engrave the failed place again.

Now let's see what a typical drawing process looks like. Kent Barton is one of the standouts American illustrators in this technique. Of course. in this technique, they order works with a historical flair or a touch of antiquity. So he received an order for an illustration about gunfighters.

First, the mass is collected reference material. Separate details and scenes are drawn on the tracing paper:

The most detailed drawing, in which all tone ratios are applied, is approved by the customer, if necessary, new options are drawn and glued. After that, the drawing is transferred to the scratchboard. Kent works on a black and a white scratchboard. Why? Not always convenient White background completely brush out of the black scrapboard.

Therefore, it works in local black. On the right - a drawing prepared for work, the figure in it is filled with ink. On the right is an already "engraved" drawing on what used to be a black spot too.

He does not have a knife in his hand, but a special scraper with a wooden handle and two points:

Part by part, he moves forward on the sheet. In order not to lubricate the drawing with black “shavings”, a napkin is placed under the arm, while the “engraved” dust from the drawing is brushed off from time to time.

Here's a bigger one. On a black scratchboard, the black color is usually even and deep, here you can see how Kent painted it himself. anyway, in the end it will be a drawing with linear hatching.

And this is his work:

Larger jacket:

For such hatching, a steady hand is needed no worse than that of ancient engravers.

Here you can see what different types strokes are applied. on the face in shape, with the expansion and contraction of the line to create the desired tone, on the hat with separate white dots, against the background of a disorderly cross-hatching.

Well, isn't he handsome?

Technique comes out especially well in this technique (unexpected pun)

And here is a direct imitation of an old illustration from some catalog or brochure.

Now let's look at another great artist working in this technique - Mark Summers (Mark Summers). This is his motorcycle at the beginning of the post, I hope I impressed you with its thoroughness.

Quick sketch for illustration.

The second stage is a more detailed drawing with color. Some illustrators color their "engravings". Mark is just one of those who loves colored drawings. Therefore, he draws a detailed sketch with a marker on tracing paper, sticks this tracing paper entirely on a colored sheet of the desired shade and passes over it with white in bright places. She herself calls this sketch technique "Byzantine", referring to its strange complexity :)

It works just on a black scratchboard. He transfers the drawing to it and engraves figure after figure. It takes him at least three days to complete each character.

If the work was supposed to be in color, he scans his finished scratchboard, prints it on photo paper, paints fine details with watercolors, then fills large planes with glazing oil paint. So, unlike Tenniel, he has two originals coming out at once :)

It is clear that for such a technique you need to draw brilliantly in the first place. And it’s very good to understand chiaroscuro - you have to dial the tones in the opposite way to regular pattern- the more you stroke in one place - the lighter it becomes.

Here is another tinted Hatter. It is a pity that in the days of Carroll there were no scratchboards :)

And another commercial illustrator: Michael Halbert
Olive Tree:

And detail:

Mark Twain:

And his right hand:

I don't know who, in a hat:

And a detail. Michael specifically imitates the most classic form of woodcut.

And a bigger detail:

And finally: Halloween witch

And her face is big:

Now you are experts in this rare technique :)
_____

On LiveJournal, I have other posts in the "illustrator techniques" series, I won't give a link here.

The history of engraving dates back to ancient China, but a special distribution this species received art in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance following it. The secrets and techniques of making engravings, having undergone some transformation, have come down to us.

The process of creating a real engraving is complex and requires some preparation, availability necessary tools, knowledge of technology, physical strength and experience. There are many various techniques and techniques that professional engravers are familiar with. Despite the complexity and multi-stage nature of this type of creativity, engravings are very popular.

Works of art in the style of engraving are very valuable for their special presentation of the drawing, the efforts of the master spent on creating unique paintings on this technique, as well as ample opportunities for creative self-expression, allowing you to draw true masterpieces.

Now every child can try himself in this difficult art. To do this, you do not need to study for a long time and buy expensive materials and tools. Did you know that there are, they are the most popular. The attention of modern children and their parents is presented with numerous sets for children's creativity in the genre of engraving, which are easy and simple to use.

What is a children's print?

The technology for creating children's engravings is very different from the real one. The set of a young engraver consists of a blank and a special tool - a graver. The blank is a sheet of thick cardboard, on which two layers of paint are applied. The first layer is the base, the second layer is the engraving surface itself. The children's engraver is presented in the form of a pen with a metal tip bevelled on its side.

This shape is modeled after a real professional instrument of the same name. The special angle of the bevel of the metal part of the engraver is designed for the convenience of removing the surface layer of paint. The workpiece has already been marked with an outline of a drawing that the child will have to engrave. Passing the engraver over the dark top paint, the child easily cleans it off, and the base paint appears in the resulting “free” stroke. For greater aesthetics and grace of the resulting work, manufacturers make the base layer silver or gold. The resulting paintings are very reminiscent of real engravings, and it is really very beautiful.

At what age can one begin to get acquainted with engraving?

Most simple sets for creativity this direction designed for children 5 years old. The drawing in such blanks is distinguished by simplicity and large details, and the base paint, as a rule, is rainbow, which is very popular with five-year-olds. For older children, you can choose more complex pattern with small lines. The theme of the image for engravings can be different. Here it is better to focus on the preferences of your child. It could be any animal old castle or a copy of a real-life building, a bouquet of flowers or an image of a ship, car, plane. Each child will be able to find the drawing that will suit his taste.

Does the child need help in the first stage?

Yes. Despite the accessibility and simplicity of children's engravings, an adult should explain to the child exactly how to hold the tool, how to position the drawing in order to achieve the best results. The engraver must be tightly clamped in the palm of the working hand - so that it is convenient to press, and the tool does not dangle from side to side. When drawing lines, you need to make movements not from yourself, but, on the contrary, towards yourself. This technique allows you to better control the uniformity of the removal of the paint layer and rationally distribute efforts. If it becomes necessary to draw a curved line, it would be better if the child can move not a hand with a chisel clamped in it, but a sheet of paper. This is especially important if he wants to continue his acquaintance with the art of engraving and move from children's sets to a more difficult level by engraving on metal or wood.