I’m posting my first mixed media project for this website! Yay!
This one is a lot of fun, it’s easy, and even kids can enjoy making something like this.
The best part of all, it’s a great way to recycle and the textures you can create are really, really cool.
What am I talking about? Viva paper towels! It almost looks like handmade paper when it’s finished. Let me walk you through it.
Viva Paper Towels as Art
You may wonder how or why I decided to use paper towels in an art piece. Well like lots of my brilliant ideas (ahem…) it was quite an accident.
I always use Viva paper towels when I paint, especially with watercolors. They are not only great for lifting up pigment from the paper, but they make a great clean-up tool since they are so cloth-like.
I use them to wipe the colors off of my porcelain palette when I’ve completed a large watercolor painting. For some reason, I always had a hard time throwing them away. I just let the crumpled ball air-dry and then store it in a drawer.
I realized once they were dry and unfolded there were some beautiful and interesting effects that were achieved, all quite by accident.
As you can see above, I had a lot of blue and green paints on my palette one day.
Preparing Your Viva Paper Towels
If you don’t have a weird collection of old used paper towels like I do, you can improvise.
Take 2 or 3 full-sized sheets of Viva brand, make some juicy puddles of your favorite watercolor paints, and splash/splatter/dip the colors onto your towel.
You can even twist your towel up and dunk it into several dixie cups filled with different colors. (Sort of like Tie-Dye.)
It’s so much fun to see the colors spread and mingle!
Once done, let dry completely and join me for the next step.
Tearing and Pasting Your Paper Towels
First, designate one of your dry Viva towels as the base. From the others, tear out chunks that you like (don’t cut with scissors, it doesn’t look right.)
Prepare watercolor paper (at least 140 lbs) slightly larger than the the paper towel. Paste the towel onto your watercolor paper using matte medium or other matte collage glue of your choice.
Press down flat, and use the same collage glue to affix your torn pieces into an interesting pattern.
Here is a closeup to show you how neat the effect is! It looks like fancy hand-torn paper.
Now that the glue has dried, I’m going to create a simple silhouette of flower shapes and paint negatively around them using various media.
Creating a Design on Your Collage
I’m using a Caran d’Ache water-soluble crayon to outline some impressionistic flower shapes. I will dilute with water and add more darks as I go. I want to keep the centers of the flowers untouched.
I started with a white outline first just to get my placements right.
Now I blended the crayon with water going outwards away from the flower designs, and added washes of dark Payne’s Gray watercolor paint and even some black fluid acrylics to really make the subjects “pop.”
At the very end, I added a little white acrylic paint into some of the leaves as well.
Completing Your Design
Even with the paper towels glued down, you can still add more watercolor washes where you need them to fine tune the composition.
And you don’t have to stop here–more collage, adding opaque paints, incorporating found objects–go with it and have fun!
Here is my finished piece:
“For This Moment to be Free” by Aura Lesnjak
Try this one with your kids! They will have a blast splashing the paint around on the towels–it doesn’t even have to be watercolors, it can be diluted craft paints or poster paints even–somewhat different look, but just as much fun.
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. As always, please feel free to leave me questions or comments below, or take my survey so I can continue to post the fun art lessons that you most want to see.
Thanks again for visiting!
