Art Class Notes, Class 5

I had a bit of fun this week with tissue paper, liquid gloss medium and liquid acrylics. We made a paper that can be used for many purposes. It all started with cheapo dollar store tissue paper and ended up a stronger, sort of plasticy, thicker type of paper. I could use this for gifting, or even for background in a painting or card. It has a translucent look to it so light passes through nicely and it could be used for wall hanging or maybe even in front of a window. It's actually very lovely to look at and I'm looking forward to finding some uses for it.

The process was pretty basic. What I did was take butcher paper, or freezer paper and lay it down on the table with the shiny side up. Place the tissue paper on top of this. For the class we used very very thin tissue paper but I also brought a piece of tissue I bought at Target for a gift bag. This tissue was a bit thicker and I liked using it a bit better, it wasn't so terribly fragile. Anyway, mix some liquid gloss medium (enough to paint the tissue with) with few drops of the liquid acrylic. The liquid acrylic is very concentrated so go easy at first, then add more if necessary. A side note, I used the Golden Liquid Matte Medium and it as just a bit too thick for this process. The Liquitex medium was a bit thinner and that made it so much nicer to not have my paper ripping at every brush. So, gently gently paint this mixture onto the tissue paper. You can do this however you like, blending, adding other colors, etc until you are happy with the result. I then added stamps, ultra super fine glitter, etc. The stamps I used with the liquid acrylic came out more transparent than the ones I did with regular acrylic. You can see this by looking at the blue paper. The spirals and dots sit right on top of the tissue. The others seem to blend in a bit better. Both results are nice, just different from each other.


This class definitely focused on playing with the acrylics and the mediums. One of the other things we did in class was to take brown paper bags and cut them up into pieces for painting. We then used the matte medium to paint the paper with. This helped seal the brown paper making it much less absorbent, and allowed the lovely brown color to still show through. If you were looking to block the brown out painting first with gesso would be the way to go. We then used this prepared brown paper to do all sorts of painting on and also using texture with. Bubble wrap, cheese cloth wadded up, regular gel medium (not soft) spackled on with a pallete knife....all of these produce lovely textures. I did my brown paper with some blue acrylic, then translucent white liquid, then laid the cheese cloth in and painted the blue acrylic over that. I was planning on removing the cheese cloth to allow a texture to show through, but by the time I go home the paint had dried too much and the paper started ripping when I was removing it. I just let it stay and I think what I'll do is make it into a painting involving an angel or something like that. This is a pretty horrible horrible picture but I had on so I'm adding it...try to overlook it horribleness.

I said try.

Well, that's our 5th class in a nutshell. It was fun and hopefully I'll be able to use some of this stuff in future art work. That's mainly what this class has been about, playing with the medium to learn how it handles, how it works, so that when I want to create a certain look or have something in a piece of work I will know a bit about how to go about achieving that.