This article briefly summerizes use of paste and paper to prepare beautiful cover.
Heres what you need to start:
You need a paste medium to start with. Yup, just plain old wallpaper paste like you buy at Home Depot.
Then you need paper. Some artists use watercolor paper, handmade paper, recycled paper.
Now, you need paint. That was easy. I love to buy new stuff just as much as anyone else, but this is really a medium that you can jump into without a big investment! What kind of paint did I use? I used acrylics, fabric paint (paper is cotton, right?), craft paint . I didnt use oils or watercolors.
Tools? This is the fun part. I did buy a spackling thing , but other than that I started out with really fancy tools like sponges, plastic flatware, combs, cut-up plastic deli container lids, that kind of stuff.
Now, the process:
I use a large, shallow tray to do this on. It keeps my kitchen table cleaner. I lightly mist the paper on both sides (some people mist, some dont try it both ways). I lay a piece of wax paper down on the tray and then put the paper down on top of that. I found that the wax paper is better than newspaper, which stuck to the paper too often.
Then I put about two spoonfuls of the wallpaper paste down on the paper. Then I add a couple of drops of paint to the paste and smear it around, coating the paper. Sometimes you have to add more paste, sometimes more paint. I also found that a few drops of Liquitex Iridescent medium makes the paint really shine when its dry.
Once the paper is coated, you can texture it with a comb, sponge or fork. Play with dabbing, scraping, brushing, poking. Add a different color and smear that in. One of the effects I really like is to use a foam roller to get a nice even texture and then draw through the surface to displace the texture and get a smooth line. You can also coat a piece of paper, place a second piece over it, smooth the top piece with a brayer and then pull them apart the suction creates peaks and valleys and is a really nice effect.
Once the pages are done, lay them out to dry. Most of mine dry in twelve hours or so. I then iron them to smooth them out. Some people eliminate this step, but I like the pages smooth and flat. Thats all.
Creating my covers
My next step was to cut the paste paper sheets into 8.5 x 7 pieces the size of my cover. I did this one sheet at a time, choosing the nicest area of the piece. Of course I kept all the scraps who knows when Im going to need a 8.5 x 4 piece of paste paper? After that I ran the pieces through the Xyron (http://www.xyron.com) machine to apply adhesive to the entire back. I then cut a frame out of each piece using a Ellison die cutter. Of course I saved the frames who knows when youre going to need a paste paper frame with adhesive on it?
I then created the bottom layer of the cover. I wrote out the book title in calligraphy and scanned it. Using the prepared sheets, I figured out where the calligraphy needs to appear on the bottom layer and printed the sheets out. The rest was easy I just peeled off the adhesive and applied the paste paper to the bottom layer.
The covers look great, I had a terrific time working with paste paper and now I have all these great left-over scraps!Visit http://venturemall.tripod.com for arts and craft supplies.
About the Author
Ajay Patole is a qualified management professional working as sales manager and runs a site 'Venturemall',a cool hangout to play money games,buy and sell in auctions,date and photochat.It is available at URL http://venturemall.tripod.com and newsletter to rediscover true colors of life at http://www.topica.com/lists/venturemall.Also he runs a community 'Venturecon', for entrepreneurs which is available at URL http://groups.msn.com/venturecon.