Paste Papers

The paste paper I made yesterday is finally dry.  I overworked the piece and cause the colors to blend.  The steps on the page started with wetting the water color paper.  Then I poured the paste onto the paper because it was so thin.  I couldn't use a brush properly so I just used my hands to spread and lightly mix colors, blue, red and yellow.  I tried a comb and it didn't keep the marks.  I left it to sit 10 minutes and that didn't make a difference.  Next I tried a lot of salt sprinkled on the paper but it didn't make a great difference.  So I waited an hour and the paste was a little thicker but not much.  Then I tried rubber stamping and it made a light indentation on the paper.  After another two hours the paste was starting to thicken.  Taking a comb I made wave like patterns through the paste.  That caused the colors to blend.  Then I combed waves along the length of the paper.  That caused the paper to blend colors even more and made it mostly green.

Over worked paste paper but still lovely.  The picture has been darkened in a photo editing program to the correct darkness of the original.

The camera kept washing out the image so I enhanced the darkness.  Even though the over all color is green you can clearly see pockets of color and the complexity of the color blending.  It reminds me of the ocean.  This is also only a small closeup of the whole paper.

Well I decided to use the paste one more time and started with a new strategy.  I used a brush this time and then just colored in sections rather than start blending the colors.  Now I am waiting for the paste to dry on the paper.

Stripes on the primary colors.  You can see the paste is
very thin and is streaking when brushed onto the sheets.

After two hours I went back and painted the paper again.  The paper had dried so I put another layer of paste like before.  Just layering the same colors.  The sun was on the paper so I couldn't get a good picture.  After three hours it needed to come inside and dry.  I will have to make new paste to continue.  Perhaps a different recipe.