Need A Tissue?

This month’s GPP Street Team Crusade is painting tissue paper.  March has been crazy – busy with work and making cards for others – so I just started this month’s project yesterday.  I was ready to throw in the towel on this one and get an early start on next month’s, but I really wanted to try the technique.  I’m glad I did because it was so much fun.

First, I choose a white piece of tissue and an orange-red piece.  Both were stolen from school nothing fancy.  Sometimes when I try a new technique I throw everything I’ve got into and go big.  This time, for some reason, I used small sheets to start.  I painted gesso over each piece.  Usually I skip this step because when I finally get a chance to work, I hate waiting for it to dry before I can get started.  However, this time I did use it since the tissue paper is pretty weak otherwise.

It was a dry and windy day, so the gesso actually dried pretty quickly.  I was able to start the painting later that afternoon.

Since there was some orange showing through the gesso, I used a warm color palette on that one and cool colors on the white piece. 

I dry brushed and stamped.  I tried to create texture with the end of my brush and by painting some weaved paper and pressing it on the tissue paper.

After drying over night, the journals were created the next day.  I had numerous ideas but the small sheets of paper limited me. 

The warm sheet was so bright and cheery.  It just made me happy which was the direction I took with that paper.  I stamped the letters onto the tissue paper, punched some circles, and used the remaining paper as a free form shape.  The picture was cut out of Vanity Fair a few months ago and I’ve been dying to use it.  Being that this is journaling I always feel the need to write all over my pages.  My plan was to write over the free form shape, but in the end, I just couldn’t do it.  The colors were just too pretty.  I used silver gel and wrote on the dancers.

For the second page, I cut out squares of the tissue and used them to frame the page that I had prepared in purple, green, and blue dry brush.  I then began to doodle on each square.  At first, I used my regular, fine tip doodle pen, but the colors were too dark and it didn’t show up.  I then used a thicker sharpie marker in order to see the doodles.  I don’t love it because it was hard for me to work small with the larger pen.  Overall though, I think it’s pretty.

I loved working with the tissue paper!  What a fun technique.