Sarah generously offered to send me all of her leftover craft paints, when I complained about the “good” acrylics being too sticky for books, so I’ve been testing them a bit to see how that works.
I’m in the habit of making a swishy blended background before doing anything specific, rather than draw outlines and colour in the shapes (thinking I should try that just to turn things upside down a bit). They dry pretty quick, but all the same you can’t just work on 10 pages at the same time unless you have 10 books, the downside to bound instead of loose pages. So just covering a page with a few quick strokes isn’t in fact a very gratifying way to paint, too many breaks.
Yesterday I gathered some of the pages I tore out from the discarded books and lined them up in a row so that I could just keep swishing away. When they’re done I can try my hand at binding them together! Originally I wanted a whole stack of similar altered notebooks, each in a dominant colour, but only the yellow and blue books were saved. Probably too organized for me anyway…
I’ve had them stacked after painting and so far so good, all pages open again. Still working on repairing the torn covers, they don’t need to be done before I can begin doodling. It’s all on a what-do-I-feel-like-today basis, specifically an exercise in not thinking.
After prepping the backgrounds, which I hope will also make the paper stronger, I might stamp some of them before deciding what else to use them for. Build up the pages layer by layer rather than finishing one at a time. Some day my table might even be tidy enough to do nice artsy flatlays, but I make no promises. You think a concrete floor is ever so classy as a weathered board or a large piece of slate?
(I do in fact own a large piece of slate. It’s halfway up a hawthorn tree in the garden with bird poop on it.)
Colour Cottage 
Glad they are working out for you so far 😊
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I was excited to test how they performed, even though I’m juggling a bit of a list at the moment, will set aside a bigger chunk of time to play later. 🙂 Next to see what the surface is like to scribble on.
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Very clever! Does the acrylic paint dry and warp the paper? I think I’ll be trying this, thanks, Pia! Also, on the nettle note, we’ve been outrageously busy and I have yet to do much researching on the topic , but one of my WWOOF volunteers showed up with a skein of nettle yarn spun in Nepal. He’s made a bag with it so far and will try dyeing it this week.
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No, the papers don’t warp much, and I haven’t used quality books at all. Of course when they are wet, the pages can curl slightly, but I haven’t had any break from too much water or get wavy like you expect wet book pages to do. Soon as they’re dry and lie flat, stacked, they straighten right out. The problem was with the acrylics I use on canvas, they tend to stick together even a long time after they’ve dried. The craft paints are more chalky like gesso, so they’re much better suited for book pages. You need to pull some pages to use it as a scrapbook, collage items will make it fatter as well as the paint itself.
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you HAVE to tell the story of the treed bird pooped slate now
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I hope they work, I love what you have done so far, lol!
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