two bits

Ang asks and I answer. How did I make the mosaic/patchwork backgrounds in this piece and in this one. It’s an easy, if tedious process that I first encountered in an issue of Cloth Paper Scissors.

The directions are below the fold.

1. Gather your materials. You’ll need paper for the squares, a substrate (both canvas and heavy watercolour paper work well), a glue stick, acrylic medium (gloss or matte), and either a credit card or a palette knife. You might also want to have gesso and acrylic paint handy.

I’m going to be working on 6″-square, gallery-wrapped canvas. Below are my papers before I rip them up.

Any type of paper will work for this background. I’ve used scrapbooking paper, office-type paper (graph, accounting, etc), book pages, Indian paper, Nepalese paper, and Japanese paper. I find that this is a great way to use small scraps of left-over paper and ugly paper (see that butterfly chiyogami I’m using? It’s hideous). Your papers can all be the same or they can be different. It all depends on the look you desire.

Also, if you’re using hand-dyed paper or anything that could bleed, test it first. If some of the inks aren’t waterproof, the acrylic medium you apply later on will make them run. Bleeding can look cool but you probably don’t want it to happen.

2. Cut or tear your paper into the desired size. I use a cork-backed ruler and a utility knife when I want cut edges or just the ruler when I want to tear pieces. My cutting mat is divided into quarter-inch segments, so I line up my paper on the mat and use the lines as guides.

You can use squares of paper in whatever size you’d like. For this canvas, my squares are three-quarters of an inch on each side. I like the flexibility a smaller square gives me because I can group them tightly and have a border (like the heart delphinium) or leave tonnes of white space between each piece of paper (like the cute bug). You can also skip the white space and cover the entire substrate with squares like I did for the background of my bird chunky book pages.

Once your squares are cut/torn and laid out in little piles on your work space, you’re ready to go.

One bit of advice: From now until you actually glue your squares onto your substrate, don’t sigh or sneeze. Trust me. I’ve had to gather fly-away pieces of paper and rearrange them more times than I care to remember.

3. Lay out your squares on your substrate. There are several ways to do this. You could just start gluing with your glue stick if you’ve got champion spatial perception. If, on the other hand, your spatial perception is lacking, I’d recommend laying out your papers before gluing. I used to arrange all the squares and then glue. Now I just set out the top row and the left-hand row before filling everything else in.

Here’s my canvas with my guide rows laid out.

4. Use your glue stick to glue all of your squares down. Since you’ll be coating the entire background with medium, you don’t need to glue your squares down well. You just need to make sure that they’re not going to go anywhere.

5. Now, it’s time to seal the background. Open the jar of acrylic medium and grab your palette knife or old credit card. If you’d like to tint your medium with acrylic paint, do that now. Scoop some medium out and slap it down on your piece. Work as quickly as you can and smooth the medium over the entire background with your knife. A palette knife or old credit card will let you create a smoother background than a brush will. Not only will there be no brush marks, you’ll be able to get medium into all of the cracks and crevices between your paper squares.

After you’ve smoothed out the medium, let it dry completely. This takes a while. Have a coffee or work on something else. Me? I just went grocery shopping.

6. This step is technically optional, although I couldn’t imagine not doing it. Your dried substrate will look like something like this:

I find it busy, so I’m going to apply a coat of gesso to calm the background down.

I don’t ever water down gesso. Instead, I scrub it in with a crappy brush. If I happen to apply too much, I’ll take it off with either a baby wipe or a paper towel.

Once the gesso dries, you have a great background to paint, collage, or draw on. I’m going to add a layer of liquid acrylics to this particular background before collaging and drawing on it.

If anything is unclear or you have questions, please leave me a comment and I’ll clear things up.