Easy Fabric Batik with Glue - Lesson Plan

Would you like to learn a way to do batik easily, inexpensively, and safely in your classroom, no matter what age level you teach? Hi there. I'm Julie Davis, and this is Blick Art Materials Workshops. Today I'm going to show you easy fabric batik. Batik, as you probably already know, is an ancient art form in which hot wax is applied to a piece of fabric and then dyed. Fabric is then washed, the wax comes out, and you're left with intricate, beautiful cultural designs. It's really a beautiful art form, but how many of us can actually imagine using hot wax and dye in a classroom setting? This process replaces the hot wax with washable glue, the dye with tempera paint, and we do it in the same, it parallels the same process as the batik. Let me show you. First, we're going to start out with a piece of unbleached muslin. This is 100% cotton, natural fibers. I've gone ahead and washed my piece, first of all, just to make sure that all dirt is removed, and I ironed it to make sure that it's nice and flat. It comes in a roll, so you can cut it down to whatever sizes you want. This is about an 11 by 14 piece. Then I prepared a sketch on a piece of 9 by 12 paper, something very simple, and you just need to do an outline of it. The muslin is translucent, so as you can see, when you slide it underneath, you can actually see the design through it. This will make it much easier to trace. There is the design. Now, I recommend that you take a little bit of masking tape, and you tape down the corners while you're working on this, just to make sure that it doesn't move around without you noticing it. Now, the glue that we're going to use is an Elmer's washable glue. Now, this is one of those projects where you really just can't substitute any glue. Regular washable glue is usually much too watery, so your lines will spread out, and it won't hold the design that you make. You need to have a gel glue. If you have Elmer's blue gel glue, as long as it's the washable version, you can use it as well. Okay, just starting anywhere on your design, you start to draw a glue line, and you can just see how nicely the line comes out of this bottle. Follow your pattern. If you wanted to, you could brush this on as well, but it's just so much easier to do it from the bottle. If you can go at the same pace, your line stays pretty consistent. Look at that. Isn't that easy? If you do have a space where the glue wants to bead up, you can just go right back over it and bring it back together like that. All right, now you'll continue until you have this entire piece glued. Since that'll take quite a bit of time, I've already prepared a piece that is glued, so let me just switch these out quickly. There we go. That's already been glued, and as you can see, the glue has already dried. All right, and now it's time to add the color. We're going to be using Blick Premium Tempera Paint today. Now this is another material that you don't want to make substitutions on with this project. If you use a washable tempera paint, when we go to wash out the color, it will leave the fabric completely. If you use an economy grade, student grade tempera, it will be very, very dull and pale. With a premium grade tempera, you'll have enough color left in the fabric that it'll still be bright and intense. So I've got the three primary colors out here. You can use, of course, any color that you'd like. And I've got a soft natural hair brush, and I'm just going to start painting here. If you feel like the paint is a little thick, you can add just a little bit of water, but you don't want to water it down. You want to use it as full strength as possible. It's almost impossible to stay within the glue lines. So go ahead and paint right over them, or right up to them at least. When it's time to change colors, have a little water handy, blot your brush well, and move on to the next color. Okay, well I'm not going to continue to paint this whole piece, but you can see that I'm applying it thickly. So when this piece is completed, it's going to be very stiff feeling. Let me show you an example of how that is going to look. There is a finished piece right there. I'm going to put a white sheet of paper underneath it so that you can see it a little better. There we go. Cute little cupcake. You can see we painted right over the glue lines. They're completely covered. You can't even tell where they're at. Now comes the time where we're going to wash the glue out. Normally, I would go over to the sink at this time, and I would use the sink and hold it underneath the water, but because we're at a demo table here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put some paper towels ready underneath this piece, and I have a bowl handy with hot water in it. Let's just take one part here and demonstrate this to you. We're going to dip this in the hot water. Give it just a second to allow it to penetrate that dried glue. Now, I'm going to bring it out here again to the paper towel, and what you do is rub it with your fingers. You can feel where the glue is starting to come off. This will be a much less messy process when you're in the sink. Let me go back to the water. Okay, now you can see where the glue line is starting to come off and appear. You can also see that the water has started to retain a little bit of the color, so there is some of the color that will discharge. Don't let that alarm you. There will be plenty of the color left. You just coax the glue off with your fingers. You want to use nice, warm water. That will help make it release. Okay, as you can see, this will probably take a little bit of time, too, to go around the complete piece and to get all of the glue to remove, but once it's removed, I can show you what this will look like when all the glue has come out and when the project has dried. You can see that the colors are lighter, but they're still very, very, very intense. If some of the areas wash out a little too light for you, you can always come back in with a little more of the tempera paint and repaint them. You can turn it over if this is going to be a two-sided project. As an option, you can paint the back side, as well, to make sure that it matches the front side. You can iron the edges over and secure them with a little bit of glue, so that way that you have a nice, neat edge and not all of those strings hanging. So what do you do with this once you're finished with the piece? You can take a dowel rod and wrap it around a dowel rod, like I showed you with the original piece, and make a really nice hanging artwork, a banner like that. Or, you could take two pieces that you've completed, stitch them back-to-back, add a little stuffing, and you'd have a great pillow. Well, that was easy, wasn't it? I told you so. Thank you for visiting our workshop today. We hope you really enjoyed Easy Fabric Batik. There's going to be a materials list to follow, along with some important information that you'd like to know, I'm sure. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for joining us, and I hope I see you again very soon. Bye for now.