Painting Papers

In my Art and Design class (http://www.gailcreativestudies.com/) I use a lot of painted papers, sheets and sheets of them, in fact. We use a variety of media: acrylic, inks, acrylic mediums and more. For the quickest and most inexpensive (cheap, cheap) colour I use Procion Paints, you probably have some dye powder kicking around your studio, so its easy to make the paints. I mix this paint in squeeze bottles and have it on hand all the time.

The bottles have 8 oz. of water and I add a rounded teaspoon of Procion MX dye powder. Put the lid on and shake , shake, shake to mix it up. They will last indefinitely, years probably, and give great colour. I can over paint with other paints, mediums and inks. They make great backgrounds and don't change the hand of the paper. I can also use almost any kind of paper with them.

However, they are not colour fast, add water and they might bleed, the solutions in bottles are not suitable for dyeing fabrics since there is no activator added. But for less then pennies, they are perfect for my 'art' needs. (I love the green baskets for my art stuff, they're very portable. They come into the grocery stores with mandarin oranges, so only available at this time of year....we eat a lot of oranges right now!)