Painting with Paper!

Carolyn's lovely tropical sunset, using tissue paper
with black cardstock. Notice the bleeding colors in the water.

This week we discovered another way to paint without paint! We used paper to create our "paintings" and no real rules beyond that.

We tried everything from tissue paper, construction paper, and scrapbook paper, any of which could be torn or cut with scissors, scrunched, folded, crimped, or whatever.  We attached then it to the substrate (backing) using liquid starch, mod podge and/or glue sticks - anything that worked.

Tissue and brown kraft paper. 

The results were pretty amazing! I think it was fun to at first feel so limited (no drawing implements or any kind of paint allowed) then to feel so free to do whatever strikes you with so many types of papers, patterns, and colors. Everyone was pretty excited, once we got going, to see how their idea took shape.

Technically these would be considered collages for the most part, but we had some bleeding tissue effects as well, which were brushed like paint with some lovely results and which fell within the rules of working with the paper in any way that presents itself.



I got the idea of painting with paper from the amazing work of Barb Zimmerman. I wanted to find a method that would allow the students to try what she does on a very small scale, or at least something similar. Since she uses a variety of paper types that she collects, I decided not to limit the project to tissue paper or typical collage papers. I would like to try this one again!

Joseph's "View of the Ocean" from above.
See the waves, the fish, and the whale's tail?