Today I thought I would share a attempt on my part to make art out of paper napkins. I find it relaxing to do this type of art from time to time, as it doesn't take a lot of skill and or supplies. All you need are some colorful paper napkins, some white school glue, a small paintbrush, and your imagination. I happened to have some 8" x 10" canvas paint boards on hand, so I used one of those. You could do this on a stretched canvas, or even an actual piece of wood, because basically it is a form of collage.
These were the paper napkins I had to work with. I had purchased them some years ago when we were living in Hawaii, from the Ross in Hilo, and did some smaller scale collage with them back then. But this time I wanted to do something a bit more challenging.
I used a small paper bowl for my watered down glue. You don't need much water and the glue I just put enough in the water to make it a thin watery glue.
I began by selecting the different bits I wanted from the napkins and cutting them out. You can see that there are multiple layers of tissue paper. If you want your layers less opaque use the white layers of the paper cutouts under your cutout object. Oh, I do recommend a pair of tweezers for handling the small paper pieces.
Here you can see I am getting started on my layout. The first thing I did, that I forgot to take a picture of, was I covered the entire canvas board in ripped strips and pieces of white napkin paper and laid it down with the watery glue. This was simply because I did not like the flat canvas look of the canvas board. (I let it dry before moving on to my next step.)
The cloud shapes and the bird shapes I freehand cut out of the starfish napkin, as well as the some of the strips of low waves and the rolling waves.
The background strip is just a tiny straight line of napkin to simulate the horizon line. This line I blended some blue watercolor pencil along its line to feather out into the sky and ocean, but it wasn't really needed. This was just an experiment to see what my new watercolor pencils would do. I cut four strips of napkins, in varying widths, that looked like water. I cut both sides of the strips with waving dipping lines, leaving a small gap of the white canvas showing between them when I glued them down. I thought it might simulate the white crests of waves and it did.
Here is a look at the completed first attempt at this picture. After I put it off at a distance and looked at it, I didn't like the napkins curls in the foreground at all. Not to worry, I just took water and re-wetted this strip with my paintbrush until it was soft and removed it with a pair of tweezers. I also didn't like how the horizon line was showing through my sailboats sails, so I cut out two more paper napkin boats and glued another layer of them down over the top of the others. I did the same with the turtles to help them stand out a bit better.
I then added a fifth strip of waves like the others, carefully adding them around the tall green plant. I free-hand cut grass from the green portion of the butterfly and lilac napkin. This napkin had also supplied all the white that I used to texture my picture. Fortunately the Sea Turtle napkin had just the size of tiny sea turtles I needed, as well as the pretty little starfish.
Here are close up views of sections of the picture, so hopefully you can see the changes a bit better. They make a pretty little triptik divided like this, don't you think?! You can still see the horizon line a little bit and if I were to do it again I would cut the line so that it abutted the sails instead of running it under them as I did.
Here is a closeup of the final picture. I am very happy with it, and hope you like it too. Tho the sailboats were once just seashells on a napkin, I think now they look just like what I have titled this, "Return of the Sailing Fleet."
Seen from a distance, I was really happily surprised that the waves do really look like calm waves upon the sea, and the white of the seashore, where the sea turtles and starfish lay, does look just like a sandy beach I'd like to walk on.
Comments