Fairytales and Painted Tissue

Here are my two latest paintings on canvas board.

The thing they have in common is that I've made them using a new technique (to me) where I painted the layers of paper collage beforehand. I've used coloured tissue in mixed media paintings before but the ones you can buy in the shops are each of one solid colour. I've enjoyed using the bought ones but this time, to give more interest and texture, I thought I'd colour them myself!

I'll show you what I did. :)

I used some off-cuts that I had of white tissue. I laid them out on some blue plastic to protect my long suffering floor, wetted them with a water spray, and added drops of ink onto the wet surface. They were very delicate at this stage, I know this because I tried to move one of them before it was dry and it started to disintegrate!

It was so tempting to hurry up the process! As it turned out, it didn't really matter too much because I wanted to tear it up anyway when I came to using it for my painting, so any random rips in the paper were fine.

I love how this purple paper turned out. I used iridescent purple ink which I thought might lose its shine after all this process but it didn't! :)

I had a bit of a practice in my sketchbook to see how it would look and how it would work when it was wetted again. I was pleased with the results, I like how the dark and shade on the tissue paper are random, so it gives me more freedom to experiment. I used PVA glue to stick it down with which is great to use because it gives strength to the layers as they dry. It's also a perfect surface for painting on top of too.

So let's fast forward to the final paintings.

Here's 'Morning Promise' that's now listed in my Etsy shop here.

And here's 'Two Wishes', which you can find in my shop here. :)

Thankyou for coming to visit me, I hope you find this interesting and maybe you'd like to try it for yourself? Any questions will be happily received! :)