In today’s video tutorial, collage artist Carrie Burns Brown demonstrates several ingenious techniques (which I believe she developed herself) for creating beautiful textured paper.
Surprisingly, the materials required are cheap and easy to find—in fact, you may already have them on hand. So go ahead and grab some tissue paper, Liquitex Gloss Medium, string, and coffee grounds, and take a look at this video to see how they all fit together:
NOTE: I would also recommend Carrie’s full-length DVD tutorial at Creative Catalyst.
Transcription of “How to Make Textured Paper”
[Carrie speaking]
Tissue paper and coffee grounds—it makes a wonderful wonderful surface. I will show you all of these papers after this is dried. I put some coffee that was made (you can just save your morning coffee or night coffee and use it again).
Now you will need to have some gloss medium diluted with water—and it’s about like skim milk—and you will cover your tissue paper with the gloss medium. This is Liquitex Gloss Medium that I use.
You need to move fairly quickly so that won’t dry and you need this medium so the coffee grounds will adhere to the surface.
In the bowl I have just put coffee grounds—you could use instant coffee but I like the texture—so that you can get a nice strong stain from the coffee. And just take your brush and very gently move it around on your paper.
All of these coffee grounds will not adhere to the surface. After it dries then you brush off the amount that you want to, and. . . some of it you’ll want to keep it and then you have to put another coat of your gloss medium that has been thinned on top of that. And you can get some beautiful parchment colors with the paper.
On the next page, and this is your once again your tissue paper, I have taken cord—you could use jute, you could use linen, whatever kind of cord that you want to use.
I had purchased in an art supply store in another town this wonderful wonderful piece of paper, that—oriental paper—that had the grid in it, and when I got home with it I thought, “I can do that myself!” and I could, and I have enjoyed having it.
You have to have one piece of your paper—tissue paper—down first, then put your cord whatever grid or however you want to apply it, then you put your second piece of tissue paper down, and you take your gloss medium. . . now you could put color in the gloss medium if you wanted to, or you can just use the gloss medium with some water in it.
You have to make a sandwich with the paper. Maybe I’ll do half of it with a little color, and the other half with the—just the gloss medium in water.
Be sure and do this on your plastic bag, because the tissue paper would stick to a paper surface.
Now let’s add a little bit of color—the Quinacridone and Black—to this. You have to have the gloss medium in with your color or the papers will not stick to each other.
So you can make your sandwich of the tissue paper and your cord with no color and then you color it later, or you could go ahead and put a little color in with your gloss medium and water.
Ah [here’s] the paper that has sandwiched the cord where I have made a grid and also have just let some of it be a vertical stream. Here is where I added the color into the gloss medium.
It can be fun to use either side—I decided to not trim the cord that I used in this one because I might want to use a little of it as strings and a collage.
[And here’s] the coffee paper with the grounds or without the grounds that make the very very nice antique looking parchment paper.
[end of video]
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