SCRATCH PAPER
Having recently started a new scratch paper with gold on tea-dyed paper, I thought I’d do a post about scratch papers in general.
What are scratch papers, and why make them?
Paint is expensive. I hate waste. I love recycling and upcycling!
Watercolour on the palette will dry out, but you can reactivate it and continue to use it later on if you want. Acrylic will dry out completely and cannot be reactivated. I hate washing it down the sink, and love to repurpose it if possible.
It has long been my habit to take a piece of paper, sometimes quite a large piece, and use it to clean off my brush. I usually use random marks, but sometimes choose a particular theme of spirals, for instance. (I love circles and spirals!). I like to keep each sheet to a fairly limited palette so I don’t end up with mud, or total chaos. I will select a suitable one to work on if possible, before starting a fresh piece of paper.
Once the paper is sufficiently covered, the piece goes back into the stack and can be used for collage and other purposes, and I often use the whole completed sheets as photographic backgrounds for art I’ve created. I choose a suitable background in terms of colour or design. Sometimes a very busy pattern will not be suitable for this purpose.
Gold lace scratch paper
Remember at the end of February, I wrote about some paper dyeing that I did? I experimented with tea-dyeing some papers sandwiched with a piece of lace, amongst other things.
It’s amazing how found objects will make such an impression on the paper. These papers make fabulous collage fodder or album pages.
My recent Hebrew calligraphy piece
I used quite a bit of Golden iridescent bronze fine fluid acrylic on this project. This paint is expensive and gorgeous. I thought I would use up what was left on the palette to add to one of the above lace tea-dyed pieces.
The photo doesn’t show the gold very well at all! Here’s a close-up which shows a tiny bit. Why is gold so hard to photograph…
Scratch papers from the past
Here are some examples of scratch papers I’ve done in the past.
The above two were photographed against a background of a piece of faux leather I made many years ago, with crumpled scrap paper and acrylic paint. This is gorgeous for book covers. The second example was done on corrugated cardboard – it created lovely texture!
Testing stencils and stamps, or cleaning them off, with some other random scratch papers. These mature over time as you add to them.
Mopping up ink that has been spritzed on the craft mat. Again, the faux leather background piece.
This is a gold one I started recently while working on my mini-origami albums. Still lots more space for further work! Circles and spirals…
Old book pages with watercolour, and some gold to clean off a brush. I’ve used these sorts of papers for die-cutting, or cutting out shapes by hand to use as embellishments – flowers, hearts etc.
The next one was a failed experiment when I folded some paper and dipped it into coffee. You are supposed to get interesting patterns where the colour bleeds unevenly into the folded piece, but this piece came out uniformly covered. I decided to use it as a scratch paper to use up some green acrylic paints I’d used for a botanical illustration.
Scratch papers created when I inked labels for my Distress Inks.
Various scratch papers from years ago. I use the blue circles one regularly for photo backgrounds.
Kitchen paper
This needs a whole post to itself. Paper towels for mopping up make glorious papers! Watch this space.
