Thursday, July 22, 2010

Artist's Bookmaking Week 4: Decorative Papers


Last week in my Artist's Bookmaking class, we practiced making decorative papers for our books using two techniques- paste paper and marbling.

For the paste paper experiments, we used a recipe of flour, water and cornstarch mixed with acrylics and applied to wet, plain paper. We then used different implements such as brushes, combs, rubber stamps, and even bubble wrap to make patterns on the paper.

My class project is to make a scrapbook for my upcoming trip to Florida in August, so I concentrated on making papers in tropical patterns and colors. I'm going to cut palm trees and flamingos out of some of them, and use others for text and photo backdrops.

I liked using the rubber stamps because I thought it gave the paper the look of batik fabric, and the combs and scrapers allowed for interesting textures as well.

After I'd made whole bunch of paste papers, I had the chance to do a little marbling.

We used a technique employing shaving cream on top of a cookie sheet that was then covered with diluted watercolor paints and swirled.

I had fun experimenting with it; it was pretty messy though and I'm just hoping the paint will come out of the pants I wore to class!

It was a fun night and I love my new paper.

9 comments:

Serena said...

That is so cool...You're an artist!

rhapsodyinbooks said...

I love the marbling! What fun!!!

Zibilee said...

Love these papers! I think the yellow one is my favorite, but I also like the marbled ones as well. Very, very cool! Are you going to be posting pictures of your finished scrapbook project?

bermudaonion said...

Your paper is gorgeous - I love the colors!

Mystica said...

Following your progress!

Kathleen said...

Your paper is so lovely. The colors will be perfect to make scrapbook pages of a tropical vacation.

Anonymous said...

Those are beautiful!

Brimful Curiosities said...

Will you share the recipe? Sounds like a fun project.

Anonymous said...

Looks like you had a lot of fun! And the paper turned out great!