HAND PAINTED PAPER TOWELS.



I love preparing my own hand painted paper towels, hand painted handwipes, nappy liners and scrapped acrylics on all different paper surfaces, ready for use in my various art projects.. I have learnt a lot of these techniques thanx to the greyt mixed media artists out there, who kindly share their knowledge with us.

I spent last Saturday evening preparing various backgrounds ready for use in my art work.
I love Traci Bautistas method of hand-dying paper towels, I use watered down acrylics as I can't find liquid watercolours where I live, come to think of it where I live I can't find hardly anything !!!!!...sorry ....back to the subject. After finishing the tubs of watered down acrylics and dipping my scunched up paper towels in them, I noticed I still had a lot of paper towels left so I thought I'd try Traci's scraped acrylic paint method on the paper towels.

After I had put blobs of acrylic on the towel and scraped it over with and old credit card, excess paint I scrap onto another paper towel. Don't scrap over the same place too often otherwise you will get the 3 M's = mucky, muddy, mess !!! LOL.

I put a fresh paper towel on top of the scraped one and I let the paint sit for a minute or two, then I put the towel under running water and scrunch it up well , turn off the water and squeeze them to get out the excess water, open the towels up delicately otherwise you run the risk of ripping them. Hang them somewhere to dry and when they are almost dry I iron them ( with an old iron ) , I then seperate the layers of paper towels and you find you have 3 different shades of the same print.

I use these as a replacement for tissue paper as backgrounds.
hope this makes sense.



Above is the background I prepared on some watercolour cold press 140lb paper. Traci Bautista's scraped acrylic paint method, then I dripped some water on the background let it sit for a while and removed it by dabbing with a paper towel / rag / or you can brush over it gently with a paint brush, I then added mica powders and added splattered watered down black acrylic paint. You can see the ATCs I made for a swap using this background

ciao
crafty joan