Making Collage Paper with Stencils

i thought i'd show you um how i'm making things for collage or just one of the ways i'm making things for collage this is wet strength tissue paper now this is not for sale everywhere i believe in america you might need to look for deli paper to do the same thing but here in the uk this is wet strength tissue paper this came from be creative to learn dot com letter b creative to learn.com but you can get in various places printer supply places sell it it's just tissue paper very very very thin but it takes a lot of paint so i'm going to show you what i do with this with some stencils because this makes great collage paper to give you an example these stripes here were painted using a stencil and painted onto wet strength tissue and then glued down and because it's transparent you can barely see that there's tissue i mean you can if you really look but it's very very you know hard to see and so it gives a nice i like having pattern against really loose painting and this can give you that effect so i've pulled out a few different stencils to show you i don't think i've actually got my stripy stencil but it doesn't matter or stencil stencil to buy the stencils and you can see they're all covered in paint because i use them all the time i buy the stencils on ebay sometimes on amazon sometime usually i look on ebay because you can just find all sorts and what you can find changes and i have bought letter stencils but here i've got pattern stencils out and some of these i like and some i don't but they're all fairly cheap to buy so i just buy them and see what i think sometimes i'm surprised which ones i like i've found a new favorite and it wasn't one i expected to love my biggest downfall doing this is having dirty hands and make a mess of the tissue it comes in these big sheets and i just cut them into more manageable pieces even though it takes a lot of pain the paint does go through so i've got this very dirty piece of paper underneath just to so when it goes through it doesn't matter i've also got some wet there so let's do the first one this has turned out to be my favorite or one of my favorites i haven't actually used this yet in a collage i just like the pattern it makes so i'm gonna do this in a dark blue i've been working in so that you can see it clearly on the camera this is phthalo turquoise by system three my favorite color i use it mixed with white with black with other colors with other blues on it at the moment it's the mainstay of my paintings i'm making now depending how much paint you put on the mask or on the i suppose it's a mask rather than a stencil but depending how much paint you put on it you can also sometimes get a ghost print by turning it upside down just depends how painty you've got it but i love that see now when that dries it's completely transparent so i can use that in a painting as a layer of collage and then part of it gets covered up and just can make some nice effects i try making the ghost print it's a very messy job this for me i get it all over my hands see so no paint gets wasted and sometimes that can be really nice because you've got it's fading in and out and that can come in really handy sometimes you don't maybe want a very strong pattern and lots of people don't like pattern at all i like it but like i say only if it's contrasted with something loose and and uh really the opposite of a pattern then i think it can be really nice i'm going to put some white into that and mix up a lighter color for the next stencil and even though these get covered in paint i don't bother cleaning them it doesn't matter when they dry now the paint sometimes this is a good example of how if the paint's very wet uh if you put too much water in it will it won't it'll leak through the stencil i imagine spray paints better but i'm not that bothered so i like the different random i don't like it to look too perfect anyway so i just make prints and see what i get different amounts of paint using up the last bits of paint on my brush i'll show you one more with stencils and then i'll show you some other couple of other things that i do so we've got dots these dots can be quite nice i haven't got a sheet full of dots but i absolutely love dots so i make a lot of dots then dot um collage paper so with this i'm just going to use that bit of it over and over again so i'll just keep repeating it along until i've run out of paint one day i'll find one that's the now you can get dot effect by printing with bubble wrap actually too but it's a slightly different effect and you see how in some places it's rough although i've pulled it off altogether but i don't mind that like i say it just gives some variety so i like the pattern but i like to disrupt the pattern as well so and i've got all these different stencils so i've got one that's swirly lines ones tiny dots this meshy stuff this is a bunch of random different shapes this is different sized bubbly dot things this is really nice i'll show you this one and then that one's quite nice too i'll show you some of the papers in a sec and you have to put them somewhere to dry where they're not going to make a mess because like i say the paint will come through the back a little bit so i've got some polythene on the floor and i'm just laying them all down on that just do this one so dark so you can see what happens so this is like cogs and wheels see that so that can be really nice in a very loose painting to all of a sudden have something that's very carefully painted oh it looks like you very carefully painted it when really you just did this and then stuck some tissue down magic so that's stencils also i got this from interviewing another artist mary french look her up marry french.com and she uses this technique and so i borrowed it which is to create uh pretend writing i think she does proper writing i'm doing pretend writing on the tissue paper so i'm doing this one quite large and then i'll show you a more delicate one just making these kind of fake letters and then i can do it with a smaller brush and be more precise and i'll show you a work in progress where i've used some of this but just kind of making up my own language again because it's on tissue paper it's gonna look really transparent when you stick it down here are a couple in progress well those were cut to supposedly be the same size look at the difference there um couple in progress and this is the tissue a piece of that torn off handwriting and here's a longer piece and here's a piece so i you can't tell you really cannot tell if you get real if i get that really close to you you still can't tell that that's just not painted on there now you might say why don't you just paint it on there but i don't get the same looseness and there's the pattern from that grid one can you see from that um that's this stencil there's a pattern there from that also on tissue paper i don't always get the same looseness if i do it on the board and i love doing combining this is pain this is drawing this is a this is using a stencil directly onto the board and this is sticking things down and that combination of different ways of working look at my hands is what gives it energy and excitement neither of these are finished but i'm starting to like what's happening in them so that's some i think that's some ball stripes that were collaged on but this is some handmade ones again i like the slight contrast between neater and less neat so i'll often try to go for i did a video last week about contrast and why it's important and that's what i'm doing with these here is an almost finished piece to show you what i'm doing and the difference so that is my own stripes made with a stencil you can tell because they're not even the paints leak has bled out of the side but i like that there's paint in layers on here so there's a lot under here there's a tiny bit of one of my hand lettering things under there which has got mainly covered up there's some newsprint there's some stencil paper that's on tissue that i bought there's more painting there's some drawing and there's some old newsprint and there's light and dark and there's cool and warm and there's desaturated and very saturated and all these different contrasts are beginning to make it interesting but i get to that at the moment i'm getting to that by combining all these different types of elements pain found papers bought papers handmade papers and big letters and small letters and numbers and then loose brush strokes and sometimes you just get to the right combination sometimes it takes you a while to get there so let me just finish up by showing you some of the papers that i made earlier if you're in the uk this is like blue peter here's some of the ones i made earlier but if i keep showing you them you're just going to watch me painting the same thing over and over again so let me get those so i made this again false handwriting i made this larger because i'm thinking about moving up to some larger panels at the moment i'm on 12 inch panels if you can hear a noise it's the rain slashing against my roof um at the moment i'm on 12 inch panels and and the sizes of writing i've been doing were fine but i need to get bigger so that's that i made this using two different colors so there's a bit of the blue and a bit of orange and a bit of white in here and so it's mixed and made a colored pattern on the which was total accident you see if i was to lay that over something black how nice it would look and if you want it stronger or less strong you can of course use the back where it will be stronger or less strong but um that's so and i i would never probably have like a whole bar of that but we'll have just a little bit of that pattern showing through so this one i did using saylor turquoise and black and i really like this part where i took a ghost print after i painted over the mask i pressed it down and got this really nice kind of vintagey almost distressed effect here so i want to do m much more with this template i'm not so keen on these diamonds but i love it here where it's a it's a ghost print and every time i'm doing this i have no idea what's going to happen none of this is planned just experimenting this is that my favorite stencil at the moment that i showed you these wavy lines uh i can't tell you what make it is i'm sorry because the state is in now it's all covered in paint and lung out of its thing but don't worry about which ones i'm using just find some and then try them i've got some i don't like and some i do this one's quite interesting i thought i wasn't going to like this one but i actually i do quite like it so i'm sure that's going to come into at least a sketchbook at some point and because this stuff at least here in the uk is not expensive i don't feel precious about it and i'm well i never feel precious anyway but hopefully you won't feel precious and you'll feel free to use this stuff in experiments uh here's another lighter one so i'm just putting it against this black to show you this was just left over from the dots i i did ghost prints off that and that's made a really nice again this distressed leftover effect that i really like this is like a wavy line one did a whole sheet of that again you can see where part of it is smudged but i don't care about that i'll either use that and make the most of that smudge or i'll cut off the bits that didn't smudge i don't want perfectly neat patterns anyway i want a sense of pattern that sense of freedom and looseness this one's on a dirty sheet of paper i was just messing about but actually i do like this is the tiny little dot stencil this one which i've only used once it's just got lots of evenly spaced dots so i probably will make a lot of clean sheets of different colors of these tiny dot patterns because i really like them and i don't mind buying collage papers in fact i buy quite a lot but i like making my own it's less expensive and also i've got more control over just having them be the way i want so it's very hit and miss what i find online when i go looking for collage papers sometimes i'll find something that i really loved and then i'll go back to try and get it again and it's not there anymore and that can be very frustrating whereas i've got control now if i want some dark dots making i can just make them this one takes a bit of messing about to get the paint to go through the little dots and the stiff brush is better than the soft one i'm using just because it gives you more control of pushing the paint through the dots i've got a stiffer brush i can use try this one it's a bit harder you've got to kind of hold it down otherwise obviously the whole pattern will smush although you might like that too so yeah nice now you will get lines around the edges like i got there but cut those off when you use it for collagen and see i really like that when i make them myself every dot isn't even because the paint's leaked a little bit through the stencil whereas here's a sheet that i bought i like that too but that's very uniform so this will be a nice contrast in a painting uniform dots versus obviously hand-painted dots but when you collage something like this into a painting it then looks like you painstakingly created those marks which is a nice effect to have in contrast to loose marks that's part of why it works so well so in this one for example these stripes look like very meticulously painted and then they go off where the tissue paper creased but against this crazy looseness up here these dots look very meticulously painted but it's actually just collage paper so it gives that contrast that that i believe brings interest to the paintings anyway just a quick uh i i was asked a lot of questions about making you know these collage papers so i thought i'd show you some of the ways that i do it and that's quite nice see how it went through that's because it goes through the back of the tissue paper when it's wet but that's made little faint dots which might be really nice on a light area so i don't throw things like that away keep them all i'm currently working on an organization system for these because i'm making a lot of papers these days that's why i need to get more organized but no that has not happened yet that's it for me please do leave me a comment and let me know what you thought about this video also subscribe if you enjoyed it so that you hear about when new videos come from me and make sure you're getting notifications about those in your youtube settings and if you would like to learn more with me there's a couple of ways you can do that you can join my artist community which is a low-cost monthly subscription with 30 days free so what have you got to lose all sorts of education and demos not just from me but from other amazing artists or coming up in june i have a free taster course to experience my teaching because i also run a full 10 week course every summer and if you would like to get in on that the link for both is with this video so check them both out put yourself on the waiting list come over and join the community even if you just stay for the free 30 days i will not hold it against you you may as well come and get the teaching that's there and for that free 30 days you get access to everything that's been created over the last year which is amazing artist interviews with artists from all over the world and all different types of artists there's educational content on things like sketchbooks how to find a focus for your work how to create good compositions how to mix color in interesting ways there's so much educational stuff in there there are also weekly studio diaries from either myself or our members and as well there's just so much more we do a monthly q a session where you can ask me anything and all of this is free for 30 days and then it only costs you 18 pounds a month or even cheaper if you sign up for a year i don't know of anything that's better value than that on the entire internet and i'm not even kidding so come along and join us it will not be that price forever now that there's a lot of content in there it is going to go up so if you want to join us now would be the time to do it i cannot wait to read your comments and also hopefully to hear that you're about to start making some of your own collage papers and just have some fun with it it really is good fun see you later bye

Channel: Louise Fletcher Art

Views: 35,609

Rating: 4.9624219 out of 5

Keywords: art, artist advice, artist, painting, painting tips, art tips, art inspiration, abstract painting

Id: 4l6QjbnSs7k

Length: 21min 16sec (1276 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021