Painting paper - part two

People who follow me on Pinterest might be wondering why I pin so many kids' activities, since I don't have children.  The answer is simple, many times kids' activities work well for spicing up the papers that J folds.

He mainly uses elephant hide, which is a kind of paper used in book binding - very durable and pliable, but only come in a few colors, most of them very boring (some, downright ugly).
I'm always on the look out for techniques I can adapt to make the papers more interesting.

Now, with no further ado, let's talk about this other technique I found - marble paper using the suminagashi technique.  This one I didn't actually pin when I first saw it, as I didn't have the materials and thought I wouldn't be able to try it without buying the proper kit.

Since I had a whole weekend to fill up (and didn't really want to do anything else), after trying my hand at the bubble technique, I thought I'd try some of the suminagashi too.

The image on the right is the enhanced version of what I actually got.  I posted it here to show that the technique really works, albeit, in my case the colors were very light.

I knew that the technique relies on surface tension, I just didn't know how to make it work - i.e. make the paint particles remain suspended on top of the water until I put the paper on top of it.

I put some water (maybe a finger or so deep) in a cake pan - note to self, next time use a light colored container - and using brushes, placed a few drops of the same concoction I had used for the bubble experiment in the water.  It was a no-go.  The paint sunk to the bottom (why I expected it to float is beyond me.  Soap breaks down surface tension...).

Because I'm stubborn, impatient and cheap, I decided to try again, this time using a flowing medium I'd bought some time ago, for something I don't remember anymore.
This time, to my surprise it did work.  I could see the colors spreading on the surface, so I proceeded to do the "printing".

The image on the left shows the true colors.  I think the reason I got such faint colors has to do with the amount of pigment in the paints I used.
I'll get some watercolors in both tubes and pans next time I got to the craft store in town and see if those work better.  The idea is that with those I can add as much pigment I need, which would yield better results when doing the marble paper.

I consider this experiment to be successful because I did get the result I was hoping, despite the fact that the colors are washed out.

Painting paper

I've seen a few painting techniques on Pinterest that I wanted to try.  Last weekend I finally had a change to do so, here is what I got.

Bubble painting

I started out with instructions from this blog, but soon found out that I had to tweak the process a little bit.  Instead of pressing the paper over the bubbles, like the original instructions, I made enough bubbles and scooped them to the paper using a spoon.

I didn't have any tempera, so I used some acrylics I had.  I got very faint colors in the beginning and it might be due to the viscosity of the paints I used.  Scooping the bubble onto the paper seemed to solve some of the problem I initially had with intensity of color.
It's a fun technique and a great, inexpensive way to get one of a kind papers from those "what was I thinking" papers we all have around the house.

This one was the first one I tried.  I started with white paper and used the three primary colors using the "stamping" method ( pressing the paper against the bubbles).  After doing the second paper (next picture), I went back to this one, using black and then the primary colors again - this time scooping - before the black bubbles bursted, so the colors blended a little bit.

Second try.  Green and black over a light (I think it was beige) background.
The bubbles were placed over the paper with the help of a spoon.  J and I were working together and the result is that some of the impressions left by the
bubbles have both colors - quite interesting effect.

On this last experiment, I used black paper. Initially I was going to use only white paint, but it was very, very faint, so I went back to my basic palette too. By the time I was doing this one I realized that the paint slides from the bubble (duh!) very fast, so to get the result shown in the photo, I worked fast.