Ok so I am a bit of crackle monster – Oh yeah! I just love the crackle! Crackle effects that is! I’m always on the hunt for the perfect crackle effect, so when the Kroma Crackle Medium first hit the blogosphere I was super keen to give it a go.
You will find everything you need to know about Kroma Crackle over on their website, including a guide and some videos on how to use it.
It comes as a semi-transparent gel medium and you can use it as it is and it dries to a white colour:
Or mix it with up to 5% acrylic paint to colour it:
The way to apply it is to use a palette knife to spread it over a surface, keeping the medium at least 1 mm thick if not thicker. The smaller crackles you can see in the pictures above are where it was around 1 mm thick or less.
The Kroma Crackle needs time to cure, you will start to see crackles within 24 h but give it a couple of days to fully dry, particularly if you used a thick layer. Once the Kroma Crackle is dry, seal it with a layer of a clear acrylic medium before you do anything else to it (I used Golden Polymer Medium).
I tried it directly on paper but found that once the medium dried the crackles would flake off too easily. It works really well if you prime the surface with acrylic mediums or paints first to give it something to ‘stick’ to. But you will still need to seal it once it is dry, just to make sure the crackles stay put before you do anything more to them.
Once you have your sealed crackle surface, you can then add more colour to it and work on it some more, just think what you can do with all that texture! There are some fab examples on the Kroma website and also have a look at what Michael deMeng does with it.
As I said at the start I love crackle and I’ve tried lots of different products to reproduce it, some one-step, some two-step, pastes, glues etc and of course the PVA trick is one of my go-to techniques. But I think that Kroma Crackle is going to be my most used crackle product – I LOVE it! It is easy to use, but I would say give yourself a bit of play time with it to see what you can do and to get used to it. One of the things I love about it most is that it works on ‘softer’ surfaces such as paper and you don’t have to use it on stiff board to get a good crackle.
I wanted to have a lot more samples to show you but I’ve just been so busy with commissions that I haven’t had a chance, so keep your eyes out for projects using Kroma Crackle here in the future!
Kroma Crackle is available in 150ml tubes which retail around £8.99 here in the UK and you can find it over at Indigoblu.
I would love to know what you think about it if you have used it already.
Catch you later Crackle Monsters!
Kim
[Disclaimer Time: I was not paid to write this review however I did get a tube of Kroma Crackle to try out. But as with all my reviews I always try to give you my honest, unbiased opinion. (Prices correct for the date the blog post went live)]
