How to Add the Finishing Touches to Your Chalk Drawing

Hi my name is Mary DAmico. I am a Private Art Instructor and I am here working with one of my students, Summer, and we are working on a chalk pastel drawing, focusing on Still Life of Flowers. And we are pretty much at the end of our drawing, and so after we have done -- finished all of the flowers, we are going to use a workable fixative, and we want to make sure that we use this outside with an adult; we never want to spray this by ourselves, and we want to stand far away from the drawing. So we want to make sure that we have the drawing lying down in the ground, and as we take the cap off, and as we spray, making sure that we are a few feet away from the drawing, so that we dont breathe in the fixative. An option for you as well is to use a different color paper for your drawing, and so you can get any of this paper from any craft store. It usually comes in big sheets of paper; and so, I chose to do my finishing drawing on pink paper, it brought out some of the colors that were in the other flowers, and so once I have done my drawing, again, I am going to spray this. And you want to give it some time to dry, about 24 hours to dry completely - and what the fixative will do is, make sure that your drawing does not rub off onto the glass of the frame - and so, it also helps preserve the drawing.

So, any kind of frame that you would like to get, depending on the size of your drawing -- and what I have is a silver -- just a silver plain frame and once we take every thing off the back, we can place our drawing face down inside of the frame. So we are going to lay our drawing down, face down and then we put a piece of styrene film that usually comes with the frame, and the our cardboard on top, and then the backing of the frame. And we just slide it in; so then we have our drawing inside of our frame, and you can hang this however youd like usually on the back; you can hang it on the wall or you can have it sitting on a desk if you like.

Another option for you is, you can also make your own frame; you can get just a very simple wooden frame and we you can use any kinds of craft paints, glue, glitter, ribbons, you can use stencils -- just for a simple frame -- wooden frame, you can paint the whole frame if you like, and usually they have little stand, a little piece of wood that helps it stand and you can display it, vertical or horizontal whichever you like - and this is good for -- if you have a smaller drawing that you can place inside, and just so it is a little more personable, that you have made both pieces of your drawing -- made your drawing and your frame. So, with this you can also use any kind of various papers, craft papers that you can find. I hope you enjoyed todays art lesson, with learning how to use chalk pastels with Still Life of Flowers.