While I was waiting to be back in my normal workspace last week, I got to spend some time in the studio, which was almost like a little vacation. I took some time after my scheduled activities to break out a messy craft activity that I’ve wanted to try for a while now, and took some process photos along the way to share.
My goal was to hand paint a stack of square coffee filters so that I could cut them out and make autumn leaves for some cheap and fun decorations. A while ago, I was making a bunch of paper flowers for a big project, and I really wish that I had thought of this technique back then, because this was super fast, cheap and easy, and I loved the results.
I looked for square white filters that come double-folded, because I knew that they would unfold nice and large so that I could cut several leaves from each sheet. Watercolors in tubes are easiest for this, but I would use cheap paints if you have them to avoid using the nice stuff. Covering your work surface is really important with this technique because the first step to painting paper like this is wetting the whole surface.
The hardest part about this project was finding a place to lay the sheets flat until they dried. Drying doesn’t actually take very long, however, so hand painted sheets should be ready to use the next day. For my purposes, I took a little nature walk to find some nice oak leaves to trace. I’m cutting out my leaves, drawing veins on them with matching felt-tip pen, and hot-gluing them to the ends of floral wires.
For now, I just twisted the wire around the branches to attach the leaves. It’s still looking really sparse now, but by the time that Autumn is over (and I have used all my paper), hopefully you won’t actually be able to see any of the wires.
That’s all for now, I’ll be back soon with some fun little mushroom guys. See you later!