Collage: Techniques to Create Decorative Papers

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Elizabeth and welcome to my class, creating decorative papers for collage. I am the kind of artists who really enjoys experimenting with media and seeing how far I can push it. I've been sharing my passion for art with my students since 2006. And I work in a wide range of media as well as exhibit across the state of Michigan. My dinosaur illustrations, which turned into a book that I authored an illustrated in 2017. And I'm often exploring combining media in unusual ways. One way that I really enjoy working with art materials is to create decorative papers. They can be beautiful on their own, but they can also be used in traditional or digital collages. Some of the techniques might be ones you've heard of or experimented with before. And other ones might be new to you. But no matter where you are not in your artistic journey, our goal is to have fun, experiment, explorer. It's always so fun to see what colors students too is and how students approach the different techniques, even though they're relatively simple techniques on their own. If the great thing about art is that we can all be doing roughly the same thing and never achieve the exact same results. That's what I love about art. There's so many new ways to approach it. In the end, you'll have some beautiful decorative papers that you could try and to painting tool for collage or photograph and incorporate into your digital collage artworks. In the demonstration videos, I'll walk you through several ways to create abstract decorative papers. Then it'll be your turn to try the techniques out and see what results you can achieve. How does color choices impact the decorative details? What else could you add to your papers to further enhance them? The options are endless and I can't wait to see what you create, so please be sure to share them in the project section. And one of the great features of the projects section is that you can share your papers as you finished creating them. And you can edit your project to add additional images and taxed at any point in time, I really hope you'll take the time to share what you create at the end of class or along the way, please let me know if you have any questions as you're working with the different techniques or suggestions along the way by posting to the discussion section of class. 2. Class Project: In this class, you'll be exploring the different decorative paper techniques that I show in my demonstration videos and seeing what results you can get with each of them. So the class is really about exploring techniques that can create decorative results for papers that could be incorporated into traditional or digital collages. We're going to explore some techniques that you might be familiar with, like using bubble wrap or plastic wrap to create texture in your watercolor paintings, as well as some techniques that you might not be as familiar with, such as marbling paper with shaving cream. So the few supplies are going to have a lot of fun creating decorative papers and then share those with the client. 3. Materials: The materials we're gonna be using for this class vary a little bit. And there's lots of flexibility in the kinds of materials that we have. So I'm going to be using watercolor. You can use any kind of pan watercolor you have. I like to use tubes and then I felt my tray from my tubes and then reactivate with water spray bottle as needed. I've got a big watercolor brush. Any, any large size watercolor brush will work. How are we going to be applying the paint? I'm also going to do some of the techniques and acrylic paint. So any kind of acrylic paint works, I happen to have a set of some Blick studio acrylic that I'm working it through. But literally, any kind of acrylic paints will be great for the watercolor. You'll also probably also need a container of water. This is my old Kool-Aid, one that I've been using for decades. And I really loved this because it's got a lid. So I can take this with me anywhere I need to go when I'm headed to a watercolor class or traveling. And I'm going to be able to travel somewhere and set up my watercolor paints. I'll grab this big guy. You're gonna want some table salt. You can use table salt, you can use sea salt. Play around with the different kind of granules if you want to, but this is just regular old table salt. We're going to need some Saran wrap or plastic wrap. I happen to have read just because it's from an old sale on holiday Saran wrap that they had years ago. And then some bubble wrap. Anytime any size, small bubbles, large bubbles. These are just a scrap from a frame that I bought and it had bubble wrap on the coordinators to protect it. So I saved those corners of our app so that I could use this in our projects. Then you're also going to want some sort of marriage spray. This one is a reusable one. It doesn't have to be this deep. Anything where you can kind of get a little bit of height. So we're going to fill this. She didn't bring him. So we need to have Canada shaving cream. The cheaper the shaving cream, the butter. I like to pick up my shaving cream at dollar stores here in the US because it's really cheap and it works perfect for shaving cream marbling. We're also going to need food coloring. So any kind of car, you have, these boxes of all kinda been reorganized with different color combinations. They're actually sorted by cool and warm colors or similar colors. So I would say at least two different colors of food coloring. You can do more if you like. You're going to want to have two colors that are probably closer to each other on the color wheel so that if they happen to mix as you're moving around, the color and the shaving cream that they create pleasant new colors. Or you can play with contrast if you like, and have complimentary colors instead. But that'll be a little bit of trial and error and experimentation, but at least two colors of food coloring and then toothpicks or a cooking a skewer to move around the food coloring ways you're adding it to the surface of the shaving cream. And then for our paper, you can really use whatever paper you have on hand. I'm gonna be doing mixed media paper. I've got a lot of these Canson sketchbooks around with different sizes. I really like to experiment with materials and surfaces. So I've got some paper bags that I've saved from our grocery trips that I'm going to try some of our decorative paper arms and have that really nice and neutral brown tone in the background as opposed to the white of the mixed media paper. And then you could really try anything you want to. But I would say we want a little bit of a thicker paper. So the mixed media paper or the watercolor paper, or something that's thicker like this paper bag material so that it can really hold up to what we're gonna do to the surface to create a decorative papers would be great. 4. Bubble Wrap: 3 Techniques: The first technique we're going to create a bubble wrap textured paper. The appearance is going to vary depending on whether you're using a small bubble wrap or larger bubble wrap. The packing bubble wrap comes in two different sizes. Usually, I happen to have the small bubble wrap on hand for this demonstration. But in the past, I've used the larger bubble wrap and they create some really nice texture that create some beautiful decorative papers. So you can work into experiment with both. If you have access to both, you both are easy to find in the mailing section of any kind of general store you might have near you. So to begin, I've got my mixed media paper sets, I've wet my paints. I've got my very well loved water cup. And we're gonna be working pretty wet with this one. You're gonna wanna have some paper towel on hand to dry off your brush or take care of any spills that might happen along the way. There's a couple of different ways you can go about this. But for the bubble wrap texture, you really want a very saturated paint, saturated paper. You really want bold color to really see the bubble wrap in the end. This is a technique where there's two ways to go about it. I'm going to show you both. One is where you apply the paint to the paper and then you put the bubble wrap down and press it on there and then let it dry. Once the paint is dry, you remove the bubble wrap. And that's how this bubble of texture was created. I painted the surface of the paper, laid the bubble wrap down, let it dry, and then when it was done, I peel the bubble wrap off where the plastic touches the watercolor paper. The color kinda pulls a little bit. So this is probably a technique that you've seen or tried before. But it works really nice for collage papers too. I've used it mostly. I use it in my abstract watercolor artworks. And it's in one of my other watercolor classes on Skillshare, but I really like it also as a decorative paper. The other way to do this, we're going to paint the bubble surface itself and then we'll use it more like a stamp. That is how this one was made. I was working with warm colors and I painted right on the bubble wrap surface with watercolor. And then I stamped it down and moved it and let it create. So as the original stamped area that's much bolder. And then there's the ghost images as the paint began, as the paint was removed from the bubble surface and onto the paper. I'll show you that 1 s. So first step, we're going to do a wet application of watercolor. You could wet your paper first, but I want to really have more control over my paint, the areas that I preserve white. And I want to have a really saturated color so that I know those bubbler textures are going to transfer. So I'm going to have a really juicy brush loaded up with color. Pick some colors that I know are going to look good together because they're going to bleed. And actually it's more interesting when they do bleed. So go ahead and overlap and mixed right on the paper. You had some very pretty colors. You can use any colors you want for this. It doesn't have to be analogous colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. Doesn't have to be just warm or just cool. Go with whatever feels like what you want to paint today. Experiments. Sometimes colors that don't seem like they're gonna look great together, end up being beautiful. And the decorative papers in our class are all about experimentation. So have fun. Experiment. See what happens. Alright, I'm going to wash off my brush because I'm done with the paint parts for now. And I get that out of the way. Now I'm going to take my bubble wrap. Depending on your bubble wrap, there's a bump at your side and a smoother side. Usually tell by looking at it. Sometimes it's not as varied. And you can also easily tear this to create different sections. I want to have a play of bubble areas to not bubbled areas for this. And the great thing is, we're not trying to make an artwork. This isn't about a finished masterpiece. This is about creating texture paper that we're going to then use in different ways in our artwork. So it doesn't matter what happens. If you pop the bubbles. It'll take a different kind of texture for you. But it doesn't matter how it looks. In this stage. Chances are we're going to be cutting it up for collage, or we're going to be photographing or scanning it in and using it for digital collage. So many different ways to use these papers across your artworks. Can also cut them. You can also cut the plastic. I think I'd be having a better time. If I cut it. I'm going to cut it. Now. You can take it off ahead of time and have that texture two and move it around and kinda stamp into it. Which actually is a pretty cool effect. I'm going to do a mix of that and a mix of letting the bubble wrap dry. You do have to work relatively quickly because as the watercolor dries, it'll lessen the effects of the bubble texture that we're creating. So we're going to let this dry and move on to our next technique. And then we'll see how they both look when they're done. For our second bubble wrap technique, when we get a new sheet of paper, we're still going to be working with watercolor. And then we'll try it with acrylic. Because this one is gonna be stamping. I don't have to worry so much about cutting it up so that it fits my paper. I can just kinda let it whatever my paper out of the way. A feel for the bumpy or side if I can find it. Because it's plastic, it's going to resist the paint. It'll be a little bit different with acrylic. Acrylic is a plastic base paint. So it'll give you different effects with each kind of using that technique with different kinds of paint. Again, you can mix right on the bubble wrap. And I didn't get my paper back over here. Flippen stamp. And because I'm using watercolor, It's giving me a pretty almost like a controlled splattering effect because it's only touching where the bubbles are raised up. But that can make for very beautiful decorative paper and so easy, so fast and easy. I love this. I can see so many different ways that I could cut this up or scan this in and use it as a background in art work. Or if I did a representational collage, I could use this as some texture in the sky. For the clouds, this could be fabric. If I was doing a figure and I wanted to cut it up to create clothing on a, on a figure in a collage. So this one is going to look a little different when it dries. And you can have a play around with it. Different colors will appear different ways I was using pretty bold color, but again, let it dry and then we'll check back and see how they look when they're dry. But this bubble wrap texture, I'm going to switch to my acrylic paint, which I have all set up on my palette. I don't like to use my water cups for watercolor, for acrylic. So I have a glass jar that I use when I switched to acrylic paint versus the plastic when I had earlier my watercolor. And I'm switching my brushes to a nice big acrylic brush so that I know it can handle the paint that I'm gonna be applying on it. This is very similar to the other one. You can wet your brush or not. The wet. It'll depend on how thick your paint is too right? So if your paint is very thick, you might want to thin it down a little bit with some water. Or it just might be a habit that you've picked up as a painter. I like to send my paint just a little bit so you can help it move on to the brush. We're going to load our brush with paint. And we're going to start painting it onto the bubble surface. Because this is a plastic paint versus a water-based paint. Even though there's some water in there, I'm not getting as much resistance and pedaling up as I had before. I can really see where the paint is going. You can also preserve some white areas if you want to. You don't have to paint the whole thing. You can layer into it. Uses many colors as you want to. But again, I knew these were gonna blend. So I wanted to have colors that we're going to create an interesting lens to them. When that happened. Then I dropped this in my water, rinse off my brush so that reversals day good. You don't ever want to leave your brushes sitting in the water, but for a very short period of time it's going to be okay. So for now I'm going to leave it there because I want to get to this damping for this one, I want to go a little bit bigger because I want to be able to have some of the ghost images coming through there a little more exciting with the acrylic things like that. A larger sheet of mixed media paper. I've got my painted bubble wrap. I'm just going to start letting it down as tamping, pressing gently, peel it off. You can keep going. I can create a mirrored image of that if I want to. You can see how the original progress darker than the second print right to the registers differently. Now I can paint back into this is where I probably didn't need to wash my brush and add some more paints. I want to maybe just some areas like the ghost markings and I'm getting a little bit. You can overlap them. If you want to. See what happens when you do that. I could go back into this with more spilled a little bit, cleaning my brush off. There we go. Okay, They around. I can add more. I can add different colors to my bubble stamp. That is what happens when it overlaps, are going to get this cool muddling effect. It's pretty fun. Stamp Have fun. Work as big or as small as you like. When you're happy with the texture that you've created for your decorative paper. You're all set. If you want to. You could wash this off and reuse it if you like. If you wanna be when I keep using your bubble wrap, that's great. If you have a lot of it on hand, feel free to just throw it out, but you can also let it dry and then keep stamping with it because it's acrylic, it doesn't really hurt the bubbles or impact the stamping in the long run. So this one and the nice thing about the acrylic paint, as I don't have to wait for this to dry to see what it's gonna look like. The colors are true, pretty much true to what they're going to be wet or dry. A little less sheen on some of the thicker areas when it's dry. But I know what I've got as far as the decorative paper with this, it could be really fun to layer this up so I could get another color and drop that in there and keep going and have it be as dense and as rich in color as you want. Now that our papers are dry, let's see how they turned out. So this is the first piece that I did in the demonstration for bubble wrap. So remember, here is where I laid down the bubble wrap section and then I lifted it before it had dried and these other areas, I let it dry all the way. So I have more of that pedaling. That happens as the plastic and the paint and the, on the paper. The other technique that we did was to paint the bubble wrap with the watercolor and then I stamped it down so create more of an abstract texture. It's similar to splatter painting if you've seen that technique before, this is with a pretty big brush. So I get those pretty big watches. The difference is you don't get as many of the smaller ones, and you have a little bit more uniformity to the types of organic shapes that happen when the bubble wrap gets pressed down to the paper surface, but it is similar in technique. Then the third way that I did the bubble wrap was with acrylic paint. For that one, I painted the bubble wrap surface and stamped it and let it let the stamping overlap and kind of get some of these ghost images and the folder areas. That again, will vary depending on the viscosity or thickness of your paint. But you can have a play around a bit and see which technique you like best, or how you could use these in different types of collage. I would love to see the results that you get. So please be sure to upload your project to the project section and share with us how a lunch, what techniques did you try? What results did you get and how do you think you might use it in future collage artworks. 5. Plastic Wrap Technique: For this technique, we use watercolor and the plastic wrap I have on hand, much like the bubble wrap one. We're going to start with a pretty juicy paint application to our paper. This time though I'm gonna put a little bit of water down, just dependent helped move the paint around. Make sure I've wet my case. Platinum, my paper a little bit. You could tape your paper down if you wanted to. I like to just kinda move move through these papers pretty fast when I have time to make them. So I don't often take them down. But you could have a bunch of different Plexiglas or flat surfaces that you use to take your papers, doing kind of tape a couple to them, and then do your decorative paper, set that aside. But I don't mind when it runs all over the place. So just like with the bubble wrap or loading up some pretty intense color. Again, the colors are going to move, bleed together because it's watercolor, especially with having dropped some water onto the surface. I want to make sure that I choose colors that I'm going to enjoy when they make new colors. Wet on wet application of watercolor, where the paper was wet, the surface was wet, the paint was wet. And then you get some of these really nice bleeds that happened. But we're not in it for the bleeds today. We're in it for the texture that are plastic wrap and create. The cool thing about plastic wrap is there's a lot of ways you can control it for the texture that you're creating. So I can, I can punch it up and drop it down like that. And we'll kinda precedent. And then anywhere the plastic touches, just like with the bubble wrap, It's going to the color is going to print a pool there and kind of push away. The other thing I've found is especially when I was trying to create different textures in the backgrounds of my watercolors, which would also apply to different textures within my decorative papers for flash, is that I don't have to just bunch it. I can split and kind of create these strands across the paint. That it creates a really great wood grain texture, which can be really beautiful in a collage or in a watercolor painting. For decorative papers. We're going to focus on applying it in a way to create texture that's going to be general background that's used in your picture. It could be a textured fabric. Again, if you have a figure in your collage that you're creating, depending on the colors you do. If you're doing a landscape, you could use some browns and create some really great bark texture for your trees, or brown texture for an interior scene for collage. Really the sky's the limit. But again, like the bubble wrap with watercolor, we have to let this dry. We can peel it off and see what happens. It's gonna be more muddled. If you want kind of a softer edge to your textures, That's a great way to do it too. So again, there's all these rules and guidelines, not rules. There's guidelines creating the textures and the declarations for our paper. But all art rules and concepts can be twisted and turned on their head anytime. And I love doing that as an artist. I kinda learn the technique and then I see how far I can push it. We wet the paper with water, we loaded up a bunch of paint you could also do and just you could also go in with a ton of paint first. Any colors you want to, they're going to bleed together. Just know that when you're laying down your colors, then switch up your plastic wrap any way you want to press it down, set it aside, let it dry. Once it's dry, we'll check out what the finished decorative paper looks like. The plastic wrap decorative papers crumpled up the plastic wrap in a variety of different ways, different textures. So areas where I pulled it like this, I have more of a linear feature to the declaration and then the bunched up section is more like this, where it's kind of that shattered glass almost effect. So depending on what kind of decorative papers you're interested in creating, or if you can see different ways to use this and your collage work. Or really any, any of your array. You might want to play around with different ways of applying the plastic wrap to create different textures in your watercolor. 6. Salt Technique: This technique might be one that you're familiar with if you work with watercolor and play around with watercolor textures, It's one that I really enjoy using in my watercolor and ink artworks. But I also really love doing it for a decorative papers that I then can incorporate into digital collages are traditional. It's just a really fun, easy way to get some really beautiful texture that can be abstract or it can be used more intentional. Like say if you're doing see in it and you want to have a sand texture, this works really great for that. And actually, I was kinda worked with greens, but since we're talking about potentially using this in representational collage, Let's do that. I'm going to work wet on wet again like I did with the Saran wrap just to kinda keep the colors moving. But you don't have to. You could just get some really juicy color on your brush and you could just kinda go from there. Making this with the intention that it might end up in a landscape based collage. But I don't want to let that limit how I approach putting the paint or the salt crystals onto my paper. So I'm just gonna kinda go for neutral earthy tones. May get those all over the place. This is another one that like the plastic wrap. The more the Boulder the color you put down, the more effect you'll see. So really load up your brush with paint and use quite a bit of water to activate it so that you can get all that gorgeous color down because the salt crystals are going to work like a sponge. They're going to attract. They're going to pull the pigment towards the crystal and creates some areas where you've got the color that's been pulled away and then the color where it's pedaled up. So the more color you have down, the more you're going to have those crystals are going to have to work with. Which is really great. Comrade may actually put in little blue to mix that with my brown to get some really beautiful, rich, darker earth tones in there. Now, this looks like a mass, right? This is nothing that's terribly beautiful to look at. But that's okay because that's not what this is about. This is about getting that texture so that we can use it with our papers. And I might have found a little far. I'm not quite sure. They're not quite sure. Muddled it a bit. That's okay because it's all going to change. Once I put the salt down. I'm going to wash off my brush. Then. I like to keep salt in the studio just in a small Tupperware like this. I don't need a lot of it. Let's get a little bit of salt. You're just going to drop it down. Like I said before, you can use table salt, you can use sea salt, you can play with other stuff. I recently saw another artist doing a similar technique with heights and different grains, which should make sense, right? Because their purpose is to absorb water and salt absorbs water too. So I'm really excited to try that. But salt has been a tried and true companion to my watercolor application for a long time. Don't go overboard with my students in class. When I teach high school, I have to really say less is more when it comes to salt. Want to just pour it on? You don't need a lot, a little bit goes a long way. So really bold color, really nice rich colors on your paper leave as much whitespaces you want to. And then while it's still wet, sprinkled down, sprinkled assault down. You could even for little in your hands and sprinkle that way to have more control over the application. But then just like the bubble wrap and the plastic wrap, we have to let this dry. The salt has to work its magic. And actually I've got a couple of petals of color there. I'm going to put some more in there. Because I'm making this to have it as a collage paper. It can go farther than I would take it if it was a small area in a watercolor picture was working on. The other thing you can do is drop in more color if you wanted to. I want to really beef up some spots. It will change what happens with their crystals slightly. So you don't go too crazy. But if you wanted to drop in a few other areas of color to kinda see what happens. That's great. We want to let it do its original thing. But you could you could go in there a little bit. But I'm really doing I'm in danger of overworking it and not deactivating the salts, but, but letting it be less effective. So I'm gonna just stop there, set this aside to dry and we'll see the results in a minute. So here is the finished result for the salt technique that we did earlier. There are still some granules assaults on here. I haven't brushed them off yet. You could decide to leave them on there or you could decide to take them off. Usually I just use my finger and I kinda gently rub it. If you're at all worried that this is still wet, to not do that. If you're confident it's dry. This has been sitting for well over the night. I can gently go in and rip those off. But I also don't mind the literals structure of the salt on top of the implied texture that was created where the salt absorbs the color. So I'm gonna go ahead and just leave it like this and have that be another layer to this textured paper result. One where I did remove the salt would be this one. All of the salts has been removed from this piece and it was a very different effect. As far as, I mean, some of it is the colors because the colors are so different as far as being very bright and very needed. They're both very saturated. And the fact that I used a lot of pigment to create these water-to-cement ratio as well as salt amount will determine how the effect happens. So, play around with it, experiment what results you get. In the end, you'll have a lot of different decorative papers that you can incorporate into your collages in many different ways. Be sure to upload your project to the project section and feel free to edit as you go as you work through the different techniques. I would love to see what you create and the results that you get. Each technique is going to be yet have a different result depending on the artist and their specific materials and their application, feel free to share those. And if you have any questions about this technique or anything that you're struggling with, he should have posted to the discussion section so that I can help you along the way. 7. Marbling Technique: So now we're gonna do that shaving cream marbling. This one's really fun. It's really messy because we're working with food coloring that will turn your fingers some fun colors for a little while. But you can always work with you guys work with gloves on. I don't because I don't mind getting a little bit hard on me. And I find that I'm more aware of where the message, if I actually have my hands available yet covered in whatever material I'm working with. So we have our tray, we have our nice cheap shaving cream. I got my food coloring, got several sheets of paper that I tore up that I know are gonna be small enough to fit in the pan. Feel free to work smaller than this if you like, but you are going to need your paper smaller than whatever hand size you're using. And then I've got my toothpick to do to move the die around. You're also going to need a piece of cardboard to scrape the paper off in-between. After each marbling session to have a clean your work area, I just tore off a bunch of paper towel that I just kinda have on the side, so I have somewhere to set my dirty cardboard down on. Then you're going to have quite a bit of paper as we go through this. So have some open areas where you can lay these out to dry. And the fun thing is shaving cream smells pretty great. So here paper was will also be slightly scented. So shake up your shaving cream really, really good. Then we're going to fill our tray with it. It doesn't need to be filled up all the way to the top, but you do need to fill it. It grows as you spray it out. If you haven't worked for shaving cream before. So you can kind of just go back and forth. I'm only going to work with a couple of colors because they're going to mix together. The more marbling. And I wanted to go with colors that when they mixed together are going to look pleasing. So I went with a warmish color scheme. I've got a, I've got yellow and pink and purple. So we have our shaving cream. Now I'm going to start dropping in my colors. There's really no right or wrong way to do this. I'm just gonna kinda go around and tell him places. With each color. You can be more strategic in how you plan these out if you want to. And you can be very strategic in how you move the shaving cream and the die to create different patterns. A lot of people tend to do this swirling pattern, which is really pretty. I'm going to try a couple of other ones. And the great thing is you can keep going back into this quite a few times before you get a pretty muddied colors system. The other thing you could do if you didn't have a toothpick or I wouldn't skew, or you could also use the handle to a paintbrush as well. So whatever you have on hand, that would be okay to get some Diane would be great for doing the next step. I've got the shaving cream and the pan. I've got, I've dropped in my fried food coloring. And then I'm going to start moving the die around. The more you move it, the more colors you're going to have. I want to work more geometric, I think in this one. But let's look, that looks like a heart. Like I'm starting to create heart-shaped. So you really could do some of those beautiful designs that we see sometimes in cookie frosting. I have a friend who is a really amazing baker and decorator, baked goods decorator. And it's so fun to see what she does with fasting on keys and you, if that's something you have a background in, could definitely apply those skills to the next part of the class. And have some fun with this. I'm gonna try stamping this as it is, because the more I work into it, the more muddled that's going to get. And I want a lot of different decorative papers out of this one session of marbling. Then I'm gonna take my paper. I'm going to set it down on top of the shaving cream. I'm going to gently push it down into it a little bit so that the die can register on the paper. This is the other part that gets messy. We gotta get our paper back out again. So kinda heal it up. Like so. That is quite a bit of white. I'm going to go back down and kind of press in some of the areas that didn't get as much dy. Now we are at this stage, so I'm going to set my tray, this type out of the way for a second. I've got a scrap paper. Just let a job with a giant table covered in shaving cream. So they wanted to be able to just tell you quite a few French registers of stamping that you're going to push down on your paper. Start at one edge. Then you're going to scrape across, remove the shaving cream. And then I'm going to scrape the access shaving cream back into your tray. If you watch you or you can wipe it off on a paper towel to it doesn't really matter. The goal across this again, and it's going to take, it's going to spread the dive further. And then you can play around with this. I could scrape it this way because I've got some die on my cardboard. So yeah, let's do that. We have some nice white areas. We've got areas. It didn't register all the way. So I'm going to do some partial scraping just to kind of push it a little further. Yeah. I'm set to my cardboard and there is a little bit more on there. So the other thing you can do, you can keep scraping it, but you still have some foam on your cardboard. So the next step that you could choose to do would be to take a clean paper towel and wipe off any excess. We don't want the shaving cream on there. We want the colors to stay behind. And you can see it's already got areas where the colors are blending together. Because I've shown, I've chosen to use yellow and purple or yellow and violet. I have some complimentary mixing that's creating some neutral browns, but that's just part of the game and having fun with this. So let's set this aside and let's do another one. Now I can keep stamping without doing any additional work to any additional movement to this. Or I'm kinda start playing around with things a bit more. Get some more of this colored and move out. Then you could also play around and doing this with a bigger, bigger stick, like if you were using, you could use it with straw. Even straws are wider. Then toothpicks. Alright. So now let's do another one away, but my fingers just to make sure I'm not accidentally registering any mass onto my paper. I'm gonna go ahead and set this back down, stamp it in, make sure that they fit even rub a little bit, do a little free with your hands and peel it off. One more spot that I kinda want to. Times it happens, it doesn't quite register everywhere, but you can always dip it back in. Let's switch it aside again. Set it down. Wipe off my fingers. My handy-dandy cardboard shown one ends. Scraper for us. You've got to swoop up at the end, really helps you kind of lifted off the paper surface. Then I can scrape the excess off in here. Then I've got a little bit more leftover on the ends. I really love this one. This feels very floral to me. Very springtime, summer happy. This is exciting. I am definitely going to use this paper in a project soon. I am very happy with how that turned out. That one. I'm going to set this one aside and I'm gonna do another. And every time I stamped back into it, it's registering differently, right. So it's just like it's printmaking. Basically. I mean, your marbling paper by doing, you're creating a surface of material that will transfer to a new surface. And then every time it does it, it's different. So it's very similar to them autocrine. You could also play around, I mean, we're, we're making decorative papers for class. But you could also experiment with different ways to do more representational imagery or more intentional patterns between the food coloring and the shaving cream. It's always one little area that doesn't quite wanna pick it up for me. Misstep paper down. That one's going to be really pretty. Now, I really like this section a lot. And if I pull it this way, I'm gonna be pulling my red and my purple across into my yellow and I kinda wanna maintain that brightness. So that's something to consider too. So I'm actually going to change how I get the I get this out. I'm going to go this direction. Can I tackle that violet side? One of the things where you can get as particular about this as you want to. Then I'm gonna go this way to get the rest of that shaving cream off. Yeah. Yes. And I maintained my yellows. I didn't lose them and end up with any muddled purple. This would have been fine if I had. But even though some of these processes, there's a lot of chance, there's a lot of happy accidents. You can still be relatively in control or at least try to work with the technique to achieve the results you want. So there's three different ones that all started out with the same color scheme. But they achieved very different results. So let's see, we have put them in order. We have the first one, the second one, the third one. So first, second, third of this variation, you could keep going as much as you want you. I have a lot of color left in my tray. So what I could do is I can kinda pull some of this down into the middle. You can also start using smaller and smaller papers at any point in time. If you really liked one certain area, you could do a smaller register of paper to get it. Actually. I can even play with this even more. There's lots of great white happening here that kinda helps separate the colors. But there's also some really pretty mixing that's happening over here. So I could take my cardboard and kind of manipulate this a little bit more. Which is pretty cool. Then I can pull this this way. Yeah, that's gonna be gorgeous. Okay, so let's see what that looks like. The great thing is because we're making decorative papers with the intention of cutting these up or using them, using a smaller sections of them. We're probably not going to use the entire paper in its original form. We can really play around and have some fun. So let's see what happens. Now. Check to see if everything registered. And again, it doesn't have to. You can have white areas. That's fine. You're in control. Right? Oh, well, I'm excited. Okay. Wipe off my fingers just so I'm not going to let me shaving cream chaos. Then I'm going to go ahead and scrape off. Oh, that's beautiful. And this is great. Like I've essentially created. This could be, you know, they can be used in combination of the vertical and the horizontal stripes. I could cut this into two smaller papers and kind of keep those in my stash of decorative papers. So many different possibilities and options. I'm going to get off some of the extra. I'm going to dab it a little bit because I don't really want to muddle. Be fine. My kidding. It doesn't matter. Alright. This one might be one of my favorites yet. Play with your colors, play with the way that you move the color on the shaving cream. Experiment with scraping back into it. How else can you manipulate this tray so that you get really interesting, unique, and varied results? These projects are great because every technique is going to yield different results for every different students. And even within a single student, we're going to have such varied results. So it's going to be so fun to see a big collection of beautiful decorative papers when it's all said and done. All of these were created during the demonstration video, but I have many other ones that I've created. This one is using more of a cool colored analogous scheme. This one, this one came from that same stamping. See what happens when you have more of the violet ended up being a little more prevalent there. And then this, the blues and the greens kinda took over for this section of the tray. This one was fairly even smaller papers and bigger papers in the same it was I was using a pretty large tray for this. I think it was a cookie sheet size when we did this with a group of my students. And then you can do it with smaller papers TO this is very, very thin, know, kinda paper. This is just some scrap paper round. So these are very small pieces that I put into different parts of the tray from a couple of different other color combinations I have. So have fun with the marbling. Explore your colors, explore the way you move it, and then explore how many times you use damp jack, like you press the paper back into the food coloring and shaving cream to see what results you get. And please be sure to share these in your projects section. The results are always so surprising and it's really fun to see how each approach, this technique. 8. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for taking this class. I've really enjoyed sharing these techniques with you. I really enjoyed putting this class together and exploring these techniques further myself. And I've got a lot of great ideas for collages I like to create using my papers. So stay tuned for updates to my projects when I get that posted in the class. And I hope you have as much fun as I have creating decorative papers for your collages and sharing your decorative papers in the project section. If you enjoyed this class and you want to stay up-to-date on additional classes I create in the future. Sure to click the follow button so that you get notified every time I post a new class or anything gets updated in this class or any of the other classes I have posted on Skillshare. I also really appreciate it. If you took the time to leave a review, it means so much to me to learn from my students as I continue to grow as a Skillshare teacher until next time. 9. Bonus: Decorative Paper Collage: So now that we have our decorative papers that we've created using the different techniques. I'm going to cut them up and create a simple landscape collage because that's kinda what these decorative paper spoke to me. I'm going to start with this one with the bubble wrap as my sky. I'm going to glue this right into my sketchbook. It's a great way to kinda keep small collages organized. Especially when it's experimental or just for fun. I wasn't creating these papers with the idea of a grand or work. I also really enjoy my process in my sketchbook. So I am going to do that. I'm going to start by laying this down. And this one was kind of the foundation for how large I wanted to go, since I used roughly the same size paper that worked out really well to give me a size to work with. Then I grabbed a couple of other decorative papers that I had scraps laying around from a different project. So this paper came from this piece. So I've entered a whole sheet of watercolor paper like this. And then I flipped it over, drew the whale shapes. And so I wasn't paying any attention whatsoever to which parts of the decorative paper I used. I wanted to kind of let that process happen organically as far as where what it looked like when I flipped it. And then if I had my little shapes and then I ain't into them and add them to another decorative paper that I created specifically for this artwork. This one was very intentionally made, but I had all of this extra beautiful paper leftover. So I wanted to use that in this piece also. I've got some of that here. I'll have to see how it's going to come together. And actually, I think I spoke too soon. I think I put this in the wrong way. That's okay. I'm going to peel it up. I'm going to flip it. Remember? Now, here's what happened. I created another collage in this sketch book using other decorative papers. This one, I created, this one using same paper and some old salt paper I had. And then the marbling that I had created as part of this class. Behind I started with that. I cut out a section of the marbling and then build it up from there, melted down. I should say. For this one. I was thinking in my head, I had this all worked out. I already kinda mapped out the size but I didn't. That's okay. So we're gonna go backwards and try to figure out, I know that in my head this was an island in the back of the landmass in the back, and this is definitely my sky. This one I wanted to put in the front. And then I was going to overlap these two papers to create my seat. I had it all mapped out grades and then I didn't bring it down their studio or getting food down right away because I wanted to make a video to show the process. Kinda lost my organization for this piece, but that's okay. I hope that's right. Okay. Now I'm remembering this section wasn't what this wasn't level with this. So I was going to glue it down at an angle. It's all coming back to me now. And then this piece wasn't going to be an overlap section because it was going to create some interesting contrast. But I haven't quite decided how do I manage that. So I'm gonna grab my scissors and I need to I can make the overall thing smaller, but I'm actually just going to give this more of a slope to it. So it doesn't feel so abrupt. When it gets cut off there. Then this piece goes on here to be the land. And then you just kind of adjust everything down. Somewhere in there. It looked pool upstairs. You know what? I'm going to change directions. So I really like the landmasses that I've created. I really liked the sky. I have more of this. Now that I'm downstairs in the RStudio, I have tons more decorative paper at my disposal. That is why I don't throw away the scraps. So I started doing was saving them in a box. Just kinda took a regular old whatever kind of a box-like some other words, replies that come in or something, something that was like a decent size, it's not very tall. Show you how I organize my supplies. They're not mature organized, but there is a box that they're supposed to live in. So that I can keep my scraps for moments like this when I just need a little bit more to work with. Okay, so now I've got now I've got some more going on here. So one thing I can do is I can go whew. I could plan it out and I could have it, glue it down into my sketchbook right away. I'm going to actually map it out here. And then I'm going to trim up the edges. And then I'm gonna put down, one thing you want to be careful of if you're creating a landscape is having too much evenness. So I don't want, I know I want this landmass to cover up the white. It feels like it's taking attention away. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pull that down first. I'm just using a regular glue stick to do this. I've got scrap paper underneath, so I don't have to worry about making a mask. Then I'm going to do the island and where I want that. Because this is pretty thick mixed media paper. I'm going to wait us down when it's all attached. So I've got that island there. Now what this actually looks like, it's a reflection of that. So I don't know that I wanna do, and I was originally going to do. This is why it's fun to play. It's really, really fun to play what I might need some more land. Like another level. I feel like there should be something that's happening that's changing this section a little bit. Maybe not. That's not necessary. This is where you can fiddle with it all day long. Do you want to I really liked that reflection. Okay. So change of plan. I'm going to see what other what other land mass type papers I have around to see. What else I can do there. I can extend the horizon line with ink or even the very thin scrap of this paper. Just cut it off there and keep it super simple. Because then it's not grounded. Too many decisions. I'm gonna do a tear this for right now. I think I need that to define the edge. Maybe that needs to be darker. You don't have to cut to you can I'm gonna cut. You can tear it too. It's a little trickier with the thicker papers. The whales remain on very thick watercolor paper. So that creates a little bit of a challenge when I'm doing stuff down. It's good for the watercolor part. But i, if you're really be mindful, and I attach that, okay, so now that gives me a little bit of a break. They are, but it doesn't crazy distract from what's happening there. Now. We'd have to merge the two somehow. Somehow, some way. Not as crazy as that seems, that actually works. I'm going to do it like a brush glued on this section. Sometimes the things you don't think you're going to work for going end up being perfect. So just play. When you get to this point, just, just have fun and see what happens. I'm going to put that there. But actually now I kinda think that maybe should bring very hard break there. Anything that has this much purple in it. I don't think there's some parts of that whale painting. Well, decorative paper do have some more purple. So maybe we just need a little bit of that. Yeah, that's it. So now we're gonna move down this little bit. I want it to kind of follow that line. You just have to figure out where that's gonna go and then I can lay it on the second landmass. Yeah, I like that a lot. Let's do that and then I'll trim off the bottom. Okay. So the landmasses, remember we're papers that I created using the salt technique. Naive at painted back into it even after I put the salt down, just to pop some of those colors folder. And I'm really glad I did because I ended up really loving. The red orange affects that. That's there and it creates a nice contrast to the lighter yellow, yellow ocher tan. Over there we go. So now this can be done or I can go back into it with ink or markers or colored pencils, oil pastels. Sky's the limit. But what I really want to do, all that glue is still wet. It's pretty heavy book over it. There's a great use for those really thick our history books that he may have a collection of like I do as a teacher, I was always kind of acquiring history books to share with my students in the classroom. It makes for a really great weights when it comes down to it. The other thing that could be super cool for these scraps is to kinda patchwork them and create a border around a piece. And they can be contrasting pieces. They could be colors that are within the piece. This isn't something that I have ever done. This is just an idea that came to me. In this moment. The happenstance of laying down, How cool is that? Trimming them up like a clean border. So that's kinda cool. I might play with that in the future. But for right now I'm going to get some heavy art history books out. I'm going to lay this down with a blue is wet because I asked because I went to glue it into my sketchbook right away. I'm gonna be very careful to put a scrap paper, scrap copy paper down. Put that down over it to protect the artwork and my art history books. I'm going to weigh it down with a little history and let that dry for probably half an hour, at least just to kind of let everything settle. And then I will put it into a spot in my sketchbook where it was originally going to go, alright, now that this has been drying for plenty of time, we're going to take off the books that I had weighing it down and the scrap paper, my printer. And I'm going to put the client over. Now I do need to deal with some final work through in this app. I'm just going to take my scissors and clean up the edge of bed. The bottom. They wanted it to end. Then clean up this edge a little bit. And I could be super fussy about this. I could get out my paper cutter. You can see this isn't straight. But I'm just going to eyeball it a little bit. I think. I'm going to use a scrap sheet of paper. I'm just going to decide that this edge is gonna be correct. Line it up there, and then just use that to kind of roughly trim. Awesome Access here, straighten that line up, and then rotate it around. And I'm going to line it up. I'm gonna make it flush with this one. That one is actually pretty good. Like crazy. Let's see. I'm going to line it up. There we go. That's where the weirdnesses line it up flush with this edge. And I can see how long have you been at is again, you could lay down I can lay down a ruler to do that. I could get out my paper cutter. This is just when they go in my sketchbook. So they're much, much better. Now. Take that page that I was going to glue it to initially. I've had a torn it up a bit. My paper is small and now I'm going to ignore that one, finds a new section. I'm going to glue it in. So that's a really nice way to organize your mini collages is just to glue them into my sketchbook. Especially if it's a hardbound sketchbook like this one. And the glue picked up a little bit of the watercolor. But that's okay because I can just rub that out. Actually. Take some paper towel, misleading the watercolor behind. That's okay. It gives a character. Mr. embrace it. Decorative papers turned into a very simple collage landscape that goes in my sketchbook. And then I'm gonna go ahead and close this up and put those books back on, tap it down a little bit more, and move on to the next piece.