For centuries, bookbinders have used leftover binding paste to make decorative papers. With a little pigment added, this glue becomes an expressive and versatile medium for mark-making, etching, stippling, scratching and painting.
I was given the piece of paste paper pictured above by Mark from Wyvern Bindery in Clerkenwell last year. It has sat on my desk ever since. With the current lockdown, I decided that now would be the perfect time to explore paste paper making - paper marbling’s lesser-known sibling!
There are many different recipes for the paste online, but I thought I’d try the most simple to start with - a flour paste. If you have some flour in the kitchen (it was quite hard to buy in Peckham thanks to the stockpilers and bread-makers!) why not give this technique a go?
Flour Paste
50g plain, sifted flour
300ml tap water
Put both ingredients in a saucepan and heat on a medium-high setting. It only takes a couple of minutes for the paste to heat up and thicken.
Use a whisk to stir and when it has turned into a thick paste - seriously only a couple of minutes - then take off the heat and decant into a bowl to cool.
The ratio here is 1 part flour to 6 parts water, if you want to adjust it. I created about 30 A4 sheets with this mixture.
Marbling combs and the flour paste.
An assortment of objects to experiment making marks with.
You can use whatever materials you like to draw into the paste. The only things you need are paper, paints - I used acrylic but anything well-pigmented should work, and a brush or sponge wide enough to coat the paper.
It’s also worth experimenting with opacity. I mixed the paste and paint together by eye, but a little goes a long way. The more paint you mix in, the more opaque the coverage will be. I actually prefer the more translucent paste, as it looks less flat.
Loading the sponge paste spreader, and trying out different amounts of paint to mix with paste.
So here are some of my first attempts. I love how versatile this technique is! You can achieve both painterly and graphic effects.
Illustrator and children’s author Eric Carle uses paste papers to create his distinctive, textured collage artworks. You can see below his use of brushwork and scratching into the paint.
Some of Eric Carle’s illustrated characters.
I believe that for his best known story ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’, created in 1969, he used a painted tissue paper technique. You can see the translucent, overlapping segments of the caterpillar have been painted with a dry brush.
A spread from Carle’s 1970 picture book' ‘The Tiny Seed’.
I can’t wait to incorporate this technique into my work. Let me know if you try it!