This is my favorite summer time art - along with tie dye. It’s super easy, and it’s both an art in itself and a way to get materials.
You’ll just need an immersion blender and some sort of screen. I guess a regular blender or food processor would work, but would be a pain in the butt to clean. The pulp often sticks to stuff like glue, so be careful about mess.
Then just find junk paper - almost anything will do (if you use junk mail - rip out the plastic screens). Lots of the ink will dissolve off, if you want any color in your final product, you’ll need a water fast dye like food coloring.
Rip up the paper, soak it in some container with water for fifteenish minutes. Blend it until it’s pretty goopy (some unblended portions can contribute to the aesthetic - but you do need most of it pulverized to stick together).
Then, put your mesh/screen on some sort of surface. You can buy ones made for this purpose, but it’s easy to find cheap alternatives. Dollar Tree, Walmart, lots of budget stores should have plastic needlepoint canvases, and you can place this on some sort of plastic to try to press as much of the water out as you can. If you have another screen and a weight you can use that to press down evenly, you can push it down with your fingers and leave patterns in the paper itself… just try to get as much of it out as you can, it’ll dry quicker that way.
Then, leave it outside for a day or so. Once it’s dry, it should be easy to wiggle loose of the canvas. You can encourage it if it’s still a little damp by placing it in the oven on the lowest setting for a bit. You can flatten it under stacks of heavy books or other objects.
It’s a cheap alternative to canvas/buying acrylic paper - especially if you make thicker blocks. It does not take marker or watercolor well - no bleed through, just doesn’t react well.
It’s fun if you like texture though.
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I actually used a similar process to make the paper for my wife’s leatherbound journal.
Except I used a regular blender (you’re right about the pain to clean)
Then grabbed a large rectangular plastic container and filled it with about a gallon of unsweetened, extra strong tea, and poured out the goopy almost-paper.
After sloshing things around to thin out the paper, I used a mesh screen secured to a rectangular frame, a4 size… Ish… To pull out a thin layer of pulp that’s now a browner tint thanks to the tea.
Once this drains of water for about 30 seconds, enough to keep together, I flip it onto some cotton fabric, and cover it with another sheet of cotton.
Layer about 5 or 6 of these, then I use two boards with a 6mm threaded rod in each corner to sandwich the cotton/pulp stack.
Tighten the bolts on the rod and squeeze the ever-loving shit out of the whole thing, which gets rid of almost all the water.
Then I peel everything layer by layer, and let the foldable-but-weak proto-paper dry out on a wooden board overnight.
The result is fairly smooth, but textured with whatever it was pressed with, paper that looks like it belongs in a medieval fantasy rpg.
I’ve also press dried flowers, made a super thin layer of pulp, tossed a couple petals in, and finished the pulp layer to make embedded flower pedals. Those can be hard to keep nice the way I do it but the result is an invitation or event card that you don’t want to give away. I haven’t used it for any journal projects because it doesn’t stand up to flexing very well.
If anyone is interested I can take a couple pics of the journal when I get home. I have no pics of the process, unfortunately. I’ll have to make more this summer.
I would love to see some pics!
Need ADHD hobby acquired.
Gorgeous!
Wow! That’s so pretty!!
In case anyone wants cheap canvases, look for them at thrift stores. I just gesso over whatever’s on them.
Might want to look into cotton paper making. Or weaving to make canvas.
Weaving is fun - I use ends from knitting projects. I’ve only done shitty tapestry weaving though, never anything tight enough for paint. I’d be bored senseless trying to weave something that was all the same color.
Loom patterns are magic to me. How people figured out what order to arrange the warp between each pass of the shuttle is beyond me. Also, flying shuttles are pretty mesmerizing to watch.
Tablet weaving is the coolest shit.
Just imagine coming up with that while sitting around the fire. That’s so old that it might predate sheep being shorn - humans used to pluck wool.
Witchcraft!!!
Inkle looms are designed for tablet weaving if you don’t want to use your body.
Fantastic!!
If you boil this down with vegetable trimmings, does it make cardstock?
In the food industry, of you boil the extract of at last two different vegetables, you have vegetable broth.
This is really fun to do. Back in art school we even made paper out of old blue jeans - I think we had to treat them with something to get the fibers to separate enough.
So cool!
What about the ink now 😁?
Alcohol ink seems to work okay - not the spread that I like for my alcohol ink techniques. Writing on it with pens would be kind of silly.
