How to Distress and Age Magazine Pages for Your Collage and Mixed Media Work

hi I'm Kelly at book and paper arts and today I have part one of a two-part series on how to turn the humble magazine page or coffee Book Table page into these gorgeous distressed pieces that you can use in your work that you can use in your collage your art journals or other mixed media pieces it's super easy and you can just take these these shiny uh uneventful papers and then make them into this this this distressed uh mysterious look you can do so much with it I really also like this because you can do it just about anywhere uh recently I was away from my studio for a month and I didn't have my stuff but when I discovered this technique I could do this at any coffee table and any place that I was staying as long as I had a magazine and and something scratchy basically so please stay with me this is as I said part one but in a few days I'm going to come back with part two which is how to turn a magazine page into almost this is almost like a fabric that's just a magazine page from Vanity Fair people that's all that is is and this is a using a Japanese technique called mamami and I'll be walking you through that that's in a few days and then I'm also going to show ways that I use all of these papers in my own art Journal work if you like art journals if you like altered books and vintage books paper and other ephemera please subscribe to my channel and be sure and turn on the notifications and you will have more of them in your life let's go mess up some pages there are two parts to today's video and the first part is just going to show the basic technique for taking the gloss off of your papers and uh aging them and distressing them so that you can use them in your work the second part after we get the basic technique down is going to take that technique and then elaborate it by showing you how to use it with stencils and this will add texture and interest to your pages I'm going to be using pages from magazines and from coffee table books such as this one now this I got at a from a coffee table book about roses and it was from the 1970s it was in a secondhand store and because it was uh was really cheap it's not the kind of image that I would use as is in my work it's uh pretty roses are always pretty but it's also a little bit cheesy and a little bit forced so I'm going to show you how you can remove some of the shininess and make it softer and give it a patina now to do that you need something scratchy I my go-to is a sandpaper block and I bought this on eBay I'm pretty sure you can get them in DIY stores or hardware stores you can just use straight up sandpaper and another thing that works is steel wool or anything scratchy this is for scrubbing pots and this is for washing up and then it's got a scrubby part on the back the difference pretty much is you need to try and see what works for you or also use what you got these you have to apply more pressure cuz it's softer and you're going to get a softer look the Sandpaper is going to be much more abrasive and Scratchy and it's going to leave scratch marks uh you have to use a lighter touch but that that's not a bad look it's just a different look and you might prefer that some people do but let's have a look at what happens with the Sandpaper block and I'm just you know just sanding out that brightness and shininess this already looks altogether different and pretty darn cool now here's another step that we can add to further ad patina this is coffee and uh it's an instant coffee and a little bit of water you could also use brewed coffee tea a watercolor wash an ink and water wash whatever you want to try all of those and see what happens now normally this magazine page would be glossy which would repel the liquid on top but now that that has been sanded down the fibers will absorb this wash this coffee wash and this is starting to look very dramatic very vintage very uh gorgeous now I'm inking up the edges using a blending tool and an ink pad just to add a little bit of faux aging there and this is just completely different than what we started with we could now you could use it in collage you could use it for fodder uh you could glue it to some text or maybe some scrapbook paper and make it into a a card or a journal page you could push this back with a little bit of gesso now let's see I just Inked Up the edges but another look would be to push it back into your background with some gesso and blend those together and you're going to get a whole another dimension just pretend that's glued down it will be I'm just pulling that gesso out a little bit into the background so you can do quite a few different things with this to make it your own here's a different technique that is going away from that vintagey patina look and going for something kind of mad and Abstract but uh fun you it's uh called overpainting so taking this and painting over your distressed image sanded image uh you could use watercolor acrylic gouache I left my watercolors in my flat today so I'm going to use what I got I'm going to improvise with some soft pastels to make it stick I'm going to get a layer of Misty layer water thing there and let's see now I'm going to just color into this image but not make it exact make it deliberately and exaggeratedly crazy and colorful I'm going to add a little Mark making I've got a soft pastel and a card and I'm just going to shave off some blotches yeah so this is not everybody's style but you might like it you might like playing with it cuz it's uh very fun and uh kind of outrageous now let's look at the version of this technique using stencils to add texture I love stencils so much um um I do have some nice ones here these are Tim Holtz these are arches and uh some brick brick work but one of the things I like about stencils is you don't have to have the fancy ones you can go to any big box store or kids section of an art store and you're going to find stencils that are inexpensive pretty and that you can use for ages so let's look at how this works this is from a coffee table book of birds the paper is lighter than the coffee table book if you're using the coffee table book then uh you're going to have to use a lot more pressure this one's going to be more forgiving so all you want to do is go in and start removing it sanding it down and as that glossy part of the paper comes up it's going to reveal the pattern underneath I don't want to go into Mr bird too much I want to more frame them with these um these patterns try these more arches here and see what happens so this is that next step and this is this is not really what I would use if I was making an art journal page but I wanted to show you how the technique works you have to play around with it and make it your own I'm going to add another wash here and this one is blue fountain pen ink with a lot of water so let's see what happens yeah now when this wash goes down it's going in to the uh ridges where that color was l did where that glossiness was lifted so that's how it would look maybe with a an ink wash and then you could also again do it with coffee or tea if you prefer just some plain old patina but play around with all of these magazine papers are cheap just make some samples and uh get started and play around see how it's looking almost like an old Polaroid image transfer or some film that's been faded over a very very long time or maybe even embroidery it just takes on a completely different uh characteristics completely different look than the original shiny magazine page you know I didn't go with the angels after all I tried them out on this background with more contrast and they really go there so I have some ideas for them later in the meantime this is what I'm going with and now that I've got this glued into place I'm going to start distressing it using my stencils this top um Palace looking thing was from the cover of a magazine and it was almost it was super heavy almost like a card stock I'm not sure how much if any of the stencils are going to come through on a paper that's heavy so I went ahead and sanded it before I put it down and that's okay because we don't have to make the whole thing the whole thing stencl we can just add bits here and there for uh embellishment I've got a couple of stencils here this is one of my favorites it's uh old timey looking letters I'm going to be using that and then I'm going to try this I'm not sure how it's going to work but we'll give it a go it's um it's a clock or watch yeah like a giant Clock Works so uh I'm going to try those and get started and see where it goes well this did deliver on the grunge now I'm going to add that coffee wash and see what happens when it works into that again you could use tea or ink or what you like and see how that's going into those it's uh adding some parchment color caramel color to where I've lifted off the white the gloss and the white was just there some of her face came off I might go back and that's okay because I can go back in with some watercolors and uh paint them back in myself or not maybe she's a peeling fresco all right I will let this dry and then add a little bit of Mark making the next layer I have gone round all of my edges with a water soluble pencil this one is a graphy tent by Derwin and I'm going to activate it not with water but with gesso so I'm going to go around like this and it's kind of a an eggplant color the uh pencil and I'm going to pull that out using the gesso into the background of this collage like this and I'm going to go all around there that's a little better all around the edges and do the same now I'm going to take the water soluble pencil and draw in some add some go over some of these pieces that have kind of been faded out a bit and actually this time I'm not going going to activate them I'm just going to use this to make some messy smudgy lines just to pick up kind of almost like a shadow there I'm not going to activate them but I'm going to smudge them a little how's that yeah smudging is looking good and finally maybe finally I'm going to add some drizzle I've got some ink here that I've made from avocados it's avocado ink I'm going to put it in this pipet now I'm going to go up here to the top and just add this this this ink this maroon colored ink and now I'm going to let it that's a little too much now I'm going to drizzle it what I'm going to do is activate this a little bit with some water I've got a spritzer here with some water in it I'm going to try to avoid the lady and let it pull where it will move it around a little bit more with some water and let that dry and see what happens there are several different ways that you can use these distressed magazine pages in your work it could be just a standalone image uh that you could use in a card or as part of a a journal page you can use it and make it into what's called fodder where you can make these and then tear them up and then put them in your scrap box so you have different images that that you can then use for a different kind of a maybe an abstract collage that's that would look good so you can tear these up for for fodder then use them in your scraps what I probably am going to do here is use these pages in and make a a free form art Journal I I love making messy asymmetrical crazy art journals and so I think what I'll probably do and I am going to be making an art Journal to show you at the end of next week's video to show how they look in an art Journal but what it would be is something like this now I've got this here just going to rough tear this and now I can fold this in half I can fold this in half wow that looks good look at that and now I already have two pages for an art Journal like that and then maybe maybe that could be one and then uh you know even adding those elements like this so that's the sort of place that I'll be going with with this uh technique but more soon please join me in a few days when I will have part two of this video how to distress your magazine pages and uh it will be focusing on how to use the uh this Japanese folding and kneading technique called called uh mamami and these again are just magazine Pages that's all we have here and I will be showing you how to do that in part two of this video as well as ways that you can use these pages in your work if you have any questions any feedback especially if you have worked with distressing magazine Pages yourself and ways that you like to use them please put all of that in the comments below and we can all read that and be the Richard for it until next time happy making

Channel: Book and Paper Arts

Views: 16,756

Keywords: how to degloss magazine pages, degloss magazine pages, altered magazine pages, how to distress magazine pages, how to age paper, aging magazine pages, using magazine pages in journals, how to use magazine pages in mixed media, mixed media, collage, use magazine pages in collage, magazine page collage, collage techniques, distress paper, coffee dyed paper, distressed images, distressed images in collage, art journal techniques, art journal, junk journal

Id: KHt6GL7xjRY

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 15 2024