A Mini Tutorial

Okay, I made another collage--

And a couple of you commented on my last post that you wanted to see a tutorial on how I paint my papers.  I wasn't quite sure on how I was going to do this, because when I paint these papers, it's very organic.  I think that's why I enjoy it, because I don't think about it--I just do it, which is very unlike me-- I always tend to overthink everything.  Probably the reason why I don't worry about the outcome is because it is just paper and it is for the most part, just experimenting.  So I decided to  to do a couple of papers , and all of us will see how they turn out together.

I usually just paint the papers on this heavy cardstock that I picked up at Office Max.  It's a buff color, but you can do it on any durable paper.  I like this paper, because it doesn't really absorb the color and I can use alot of water on it without weakening it.  It will curl, but if you're using it for collage, it doesn't matter. Here's one finished paper--

But I'll back up from the beginning--there's basically 5 layers on this one.  First I stamped images on the paper.  I used a Staz On ink  pad, because it's water resistant,  and then I applied an acrylic wash over it--

I just used a craft paint for this layer, but for the next step, I used Golden fluid acrylics---I've just discovered recently that this makes a BIG difference when I wanted vibrant collage papers

I put down three different colors and then used a wide palette knife (or you could use a credit card) to spread the paint around, but try not to blend it together too much. In this case, I used  gold, titan buff, and sap green, but it can be as many colors as you want.  When it was almost dry, I put on a little purple on in spots and dragged my palette knife through it.  And then after that I just splattered some paint on it.

The only thing about this paper, is that it took a little bit of time, but I have another paper also that I did and this took all of about a minute--

Don't you love this one--I just spread the same 4 colors around with a pallette knife.  This is why I like this paper-- because the paint will just sit on top of the paper and you can move it around.

And another thing I wanted to show you--

I'm sure alot of you know about textured, paintable wall paper.  I love it--it always comes in a cream color and you can get it where ever they sell wallpaper.  You can't mess up on it.  You apply your paint (usually watered down), and then wipe it off and the color  will seep down into the texture, and you can keep adding colors to it, until you like the result--

I used it here under the cup to give the appearance of a table--

I hope this little tutuorial helped some of you, and if you have any questions, let me know.  Whenever I find new techniques or fun ones, I'll always post them!