Painted Love

As you may have guessed from this picture I posted on Sunday, I  love to paint papers. 

A few people asked me about what they are and how I made them.

All the painted pages below are gelatin prints and I posted a little tutorial about it a million years ago.   I used an actual gelatin block that I made with unflavored gelatin, but it seems you can now buy something to simulate it.  You can find my tutorial here. 

The papers hanging on this clothesline are simple paste papers.

Here's how to make them.

In a nutshell, you mix paste with paint, spread it on the paper and make marks.

I bought a carton of Elmer's Art Paste and mixed up the whole box.  (It makes a gallon).  You really don't need much for any painting session, but this stuff seems to keep indefinitely.  I've had the remainder of the gallon sealed in a plastic container for over 2 years and I just used it last week and it was fine.  I mixed a blob of paste with a blob of cheap acrylic.  (maybe 2 parts paint to 1 part paste?  I wing it)

I spread it on cardstock with a brush:

And while the paint is still very wet, used a bunch of different tools (including my fingers) to make marks.

You can use colored paper and paint a different color on top for a 2-color effect:

This one is blue paint on yellow paper:

Here's are a few more examples: 

On this one I painted stripes on the paper before making the marks

 On this one I used a rubber stamp:

 more finger painting:

 So now I have enormous piles of painted papers.  What do I do with them?

Sometimes I use it as a great first layer of an art journal background.

Usually I cut them up and use them in different things.

For a while I was really into creating tiny mosaics.

None of these individual colored pieces are larger than a square inch

I used a bunch on a journal cover a few years ago:

This hangs on my studio wall:

Now I'm more likely to use them as collage elements in mixed media pieces:

I like marbled papers even better than paste papers, but we'll talk about that another day.