Our three day Artist Book intensive was a huge success and so much fun.  To be fair,  I want to highlight one day at a time.

On our first day Abbie Read guided our group of productive, eager artists through a wild day of paste paper making!  You can learn paste paper making fairly quickly as it involves acrylic paint mixed with a methyl cellulose paste, painted onto paper, and scored with homemade tools, brushes, fingers, pieces of cardboard, stencils, brayers, and wall paint texturing tools.  One can make patterns or loose lines and patches.  It’s very forgiving and enormously fun to do.  And did I mention LOOSE?

What happens, though, in a day-long paste paper workshop, is that participants slow down.  They learn how to layer.  They start to see subtle effects within the layers.  The beautiful orange base with loose streaks and stripes, gets covered by sepia, then grey, then something else in its final layer, each time some paint is scraped away and some left behind.

The results are glorious.  People forget what they did first, second, and third because the results are a blended whole that works in mysterious ways.  More like paintings these paste papers are evocative, mesmerizing.  They are the result of intention and serendipity.  If you’ve never done paste papers, as several folks here had not, the final papers are full of energy, complex color relationships, movement, and emotion.

Can’t wait to see them in our books and boxes!