Sandpaper Art

I recently shared this little project as part of the Summer Staycation series at Moms by Heart.  We loved it because you get the fun effect of sand or glitter art, without the mess!

When I was a little girl, I remember doing an art craft where we colored on sandpaper then ironed it onto a piece of paper to get a copy made up of lots of tiny dots (similar to the pointillism art movement).  I wanted to do the same project with my kids, but unfortunately, our ironed copies didn't turn out as well as I hoped.  However,  when we looked at the pieces of sandpaper with the melted wax, we LOVED it.  It looked just like those sand art pictures you see, but without the mess!  We ended up making several and loved them all.

Here's our project and how we did it:

Here's what you need:

• sandpaper (we used both 60 grit and 100 grit with slightly different results, both cool.  The coarser grit just had more defined grains of sand on the finished piece)
• crayons
• paper ( I used white paper hoping to get that pointillism copy, but newspaper would probably work fine too if you just want your sandpaper piece)
• iron and press cloth (old rag or thin cloth to use when ironing)

Here's what to do:

1.  Cut your sandpaper to the size you want your finished piece to be.  We planned on making popsicle stick frames for our artwork, so our pieces were about 5.5" squares.

2.  Using crayons, color your picture on the sandpaper.  You'll want to press pretty hard to get a nice layer of color.  You'll also want to have your picture cover the entire piece of sandpaper, so make sure you color the background too.

Coloring away!

Notice how the whole piece is covered and the crayon is on nice and thick.

3.  Next, put your sandpaper with the picture face up, put your paper on top of the picture and your press cloth on top of that.  Using a warm iron, iron over the picture for about 15 seconds.  (If you lift up your cloth and see the melted wax on the paper, it's ready.)

4.  Carefully lift up the paper to reveal your picture.   You can see how ours did make a copy, but it just wasn't quite what we were hoping for and was a little blotchy in spots.

5.  However, if you look at your sandpaper, you'll see that the crayon wax has melted onto the grains of sand in the sandpaper, making it look like you glued on lots of different colors of sand.  The picture doesn't quite pick it up, but some of the crayons were sparkly, so it had the effect of glitter in the finished piece.

6.  Of course, every piece of art looks better in a popsicle stick frame, so we painted some popsicle sticks to match our new masterpieces.

7.  Glue your Sandpaper Art into your new frame ( I used hot glue because it worked better than the Elmers on the sandpaper) and your project is complete.

Pretty cool and there's no messy sand or glitter all over your house!