Straw is an amazing natural material widely used in arts and crafts. Various techniques for processing cereal stalks and working with material allow you to create exquisite paintings that are realistic and durable.
The final result directly depends on the quality of the pretreatment of the straw, therefore, first of all, it is necessary to carefully prepare the stems for work. The stems of wheat, oats, rye, buckwheat and other cereals collected after the ears ripen are dried and the leaves and knots are cut with a sharp knife or scissors.
The resulting tubes are poured with hot water and boiled until the straw softens. At this stage, they seek to obtain various color shades of the material: if light workpieces with a mother-of-pearl overflow are needed for work, then the water in which the straw is boiled must be drained several times at the time of its yellowing.
To enhance the whiteness effect, you can add a little laundry bleach to the water to give the straw a silvery white color.
You can achieve the yellowness of the stems by adding a small amount of baking soda to the water, and the brown color is obtained by treating with a stain, a saturated solution of potassium permanganate, or ironing the straw with a hot iron. To obtain other color solutions, the straw is painted with acrylic paints.
The stems softened with boiling water are cut lengthwise with a needle, awl or sharp knife, after which they are carefully smoothed with an iron along the inside. When the straw is almost completely dry, it is treated with an iron from the outside. The prepared material is stored in a dry place, preferably under a tightly closed lid.
The simplest technique for making paintings is gluing strips of prepared straw onto sheets of paper. A sheet with glued strips of straw is placed under a press for straightening, after which the necessary pattern is applied to it by hand or using a stencil, copy paper. With scissors, the drawing is cut out along the contour and glued to the dense textured material of the base of the picture. Velvet paper, burlap, cardboard, plywood or any thick fabric can be used as a base. The finished picture is inserted into a frame, covered with transparent varnish.
When cutting out fragments of a picture, it is important to observe the correct direction of the straw: vertical, horizontal, diagonally, etc.
Another painting technique involves creating two copies of the desired pattern, one of which is cut into separate numbered fragments, and the second is used as a sample when assembling the finished product.
The drawing is transferred to tracing paper, cut into parts, after which straw of the desired color is glued to each part separately in a specific direction. The parts are dried under a press, the straw is trimmed with scissors so that it does not be knocked out of the contour. If you need to create a convex element of the picture, then the workpiece in a wet state is twisted with a pen or felt-tip pen in the right place and dried without using a press.
The contours of the pattern are applied to the base material, after which, guided by the assembly scheme, individual elements are glued and left to dry. The finished picture is varnished, edged with strips of straw, satin ribbon or inserted into a frame. Dense materials with a dark color, contrasting with the amber sheen of the straw, look best as a base.
