Paste Paper

A friend in LA and I had a bit of a paste paper binge a few weeks back. We were both in our respective ends of the country, but we email each other every day, so it was almost as if we did the project together.  I had never played with paste papers, and her experiments made me want to try some. Wow, it is a lot of fun!

My method of making paste paper is 1. Wait for some good (meaning not raining) weather.  2. Mix up a batch of paste. 3. Paint paint paint paint paint. 4. When it's all gone you are done. 5. Clean up.

The good weather is necessary so I can put all the freshly painted paper out on the deck to dry. I used paper from old sketchbooks, just painting over the sketches. The books belonged to Mr. B's late brother Mike, who filled tablet after tablet of life drawings- all mostly lightly drawn, so there wasn't much to cover up. Some pages he had covered completely with red conte crayon, and sketched with white chalk. that red made an interesting background for the paste. Here are some of my favorites.


 This one below was painted over commercially-printed scrapbooking paper.


This one was pulled rather than combed.
















The one with the dots looks a little more complex because it was actually painted over an etching. See those short texture lines in the dots? That's the print. The dots were made by stamping into the wet paste paint with a round sponge. 

















It's hard to tell in a photograph, but the light color of paste paint below is actually a coppery-bronze. If you haven't added metallic coloring to paste, do it next time. The results will make you quite giddy. And last but not least, how could a faux painter ever play with paste paints without dragging out all the wood graining tools. I mean, seriously. You should have known THAT was going to happen.

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