Enhancing your Embellishments with Chalk!

I have been experimenting with chalk lately and I am finding that this medium has some wonderful qualities that are really a plus when working on scrapbook pages or cards.  Chalk is very easy to use, is simple to apply and requires no special tools to get fabulous looks.  Here is the chalk I used to enhance the embellishments on my layout.

The only tools I use to apply chalk are cotton balls and cotton swabs.  These pick up plenty of chalk very easy and are soft enough to make blending more than one color together a breeze.  Now let me show you my layout and explain how I used chalk to bring some color to parts of this page.

Here is my pup, Maggie, enjoying one of her many toys.  She has a few that are special to her and I think this pink ring is one of them.  On this layout I kept my color palette to shades of pink, green and white with touches of black.  When I began to put the elements together I thought the solid white flowers and white punched border at the bottom of the page needed something else to give the page more interest.  The chalk worked perfect to get the effect I wanted.  First I applied some chalk with a cotton ball to the punched border.  I used two colors, first applying a red tone, then going back over the same area with a pink.  This gave me the soft rich hue you see here.  The cotton ball application is excellent when you want to fade a chalk color into your background paper, in my case the white border strip.  Next I took my cotton swabs and used the same two chalk colors to add pink centers to my solid white flowers.  This worked fine on the large flower and my small hydrangeas.  The chalk stays in place well on cardstock and paper flowers, so I don't use any fixative once I have finished adding color.  The end result was much more interesting than what I started with.  Chalk also works great with stencils or masks and can make a beautiful background for your layout.  Hope you will give chalk a try and have some fun!