making background paper

the other week i headed off to a friend's house for an art day.  she was going to show me how to make background paper from old national geographic magazines and using citrosolv.  it was interesting how the paper turned out.  apparently the citrosolv reacts with the ink and makes it move to create patterns on the pages.

i don't know what i did wrong but i needed to push the ink around in order for the imagery and words to blur.  i didn't get any real brightly colored pages but i did love the smooth and shiny texture the dried page had.

i decided to take some of that background paper and make a brighter page that i could use in my art.  here are some stages in that progress.

this is the begining stage.  this is what the page looked like at the start.  this is what one of the national geographic page with the citrosolv looked like when dried.

i then painted it with brighter acrylic paints.

next i added strips of scrap paper i had laying around.

i stamped on it, not only tone on tone, but i also used black stazon ink.  i added some more acrylic paint.  doing this helped to push some of the scraps into the background.

i kept adding paper, watercolor paint, acrylic paint and doodles until i felt it was completed.  here is the end result.