Petroglyph-inspired rubbing plates

When Dave and I visited the Petroglyph National Monument last September, I just fell in love with all of these rock carvings. That site has over 20,000 images that were carved on the volcanic rocks by the Native Americans and Spanish settlers.

As we were walking around looking at all of these drawings, I was thinking about fabric. Wouldn’t these designs look cool on a piece of material? I’ve wanted to make rubbing plates for a long time, so now that I had a subject I could get started.

I started with a piece of cardboard and added my drawing with dimensional paint. If you’ve not tried this before, you have to use dimensional paint or it won’t work. Also, this technique doesn’t work very well on paper. Be sure and let the new rubbing plate dry before using it.

Adding paint to cardboard
Adding paint to cardboard

Next I added paint to my brayer.

Adding paint to brayer
Adding paint to brayer

After putting the rubbing plate under my fabric, I ran the brayer over the fabric. Wow!

Design on fabric
Design on fabric

Don’t use a lot of paint unless you wanted a smeared image. Here is the carving.

Bird drawing
Bird drawing

Here is my rubbing plate image.

Bird rubbing
Bird rubbing

And here is another carving.

And my rubbing print.

These rubbing plates can be reused. If you are at all interested in this simple technique, give it a try. It’s so easy and I love the results.

Now I have some fabric that reminds me of that wonderful place.