Tear the Edges of Your Stencil Prints!

Late last year I started to post projects I've done with wet-strength (artist-grade) tissue papers.  (These papers may be available from other sources, besides the one cited in the link above.  When ordering, simply make sure you've landed on "wet-strength" papers.  Giftwrap tissue won't work when creating papers for use in collage.)

Sally Hirst teaches online classes that have prompted me to explore this new direction in my artwork.  Oh yes, like nearly everyone else, I had already used tissues in several kinds of art-making -- but never the way that Sally teaches, which I find really exciting and fun.

Upon arrival, these papers appear mostly white, with only a faint translucence, until they're glued with a clear adhesive to a background. Once they're saturated with any clear gluing medium, they become more translucent; in some cases, they go all the way to transparency.

Below:  One of the prints I made with this tissue....

Above:  I used metallic gold acrylic liquid paint and purple Golden High Flow to make multi-layer prints with 6" x 6" mask Chandelier s971 and 6" x 6" mask Diatom s972 .

Out of the starting gate, I used scissors to cut my tissue prints into a variety of shapes.

As I continued to experiment, however, I switched to another option that Sally suggests:  tearing the paper rather than cutting it, to achieve ragged edges.  It turns out that I love these edges.  Two close-up examples are below --

Note: In the above 2 examples, I'd drawn the squiggles before wetting the tissue with spatters of paint.  One type of tool useful for this kind of squiggle is a needle-nosed paint applicator bottle.  Various styles of these are available online.

Roadblock!  In creating my beloved ragged edges, I quickly discovered that wet-strength tissue is resistant to being torn against its grain.  Result?  Trigger thumb!!  (If you don't know what "trigger finger" means, you are young and/or lucky!)

(Here, I should add that you can use a water-moistened brush to draw a wet line along the edge that you want to tear. This makes the tearing easy.  However, it also slows my art-making way down since, for me, the resulting limp edges are a pain to work with.  Some artists have patience to work with limp edges.  I don't!)  

Solution!  Almost since dinosaurs walked the earth, I had owned a bevel-edged ruler.  Naively, I'd supposed that the bevel-edged ruler was all that was available.  But because my left thumb needed a long vacation, I went shopping online, and found these:

Above:  I think I found these on Amazon but they may be available elsewhere.

These tear-edged rulers work beautifully with wet-strength tissue.  

Below is a recent collage I developed by using both scissor-cut and torn-edge papers.

Above, you'll notice more squiggle-marked tissue pieces. What's much harder to recognize is the fact that I used stencils and masks to embed images and designs into the collage. These images and designs were printed onto wet-strength tissue before it was cut or torn apart to create the shapes that form the abstract composition.

I admit these are very hard/impossible to see in photos, but subtlety was the effect that I wanted to achieve for viewers who will see this artwork in person.  Most of the subtly embedded images were made using 9" x 12" Figures Praising L727, designed by Valerie Sjodin.

In the upper right, I included a fan-shaped aqua partial-print created with my 6" x 6" mask Diatom s972.

To scroll thru the pages of my stencils and masks at StencilGirl Products.com, please start here.

Thank you for taking time to stop here today!