Hand-Painted Paper

Anne Bagby, an artist from Winchester, Tennessee, gave up still life painting for mixed media and collage. She designs her own hand-painted paper using acrylic paint and hand-carved stamps. She will often get obsessed with a certain pattern—paisley, for instance—until she tires of it, and then she’ll move on to another pattern. For her collages, she uses three kinds of paper, each inexpensive and easy to come by:

• Lineco archival tissue paper available online or at craft stores
• Deli paper (essentially tissue paper that’s been covered with acrylic) from Sam’s or Costco
• Book paper/paper from old atlases available from eBay.

Bagby prefers hand-painting her own paper to purchasing printed paper, as the ink is often unpredictable and prone to fading. "I know what my painted paper is made of and what it will do," she says. Some of her collages feature "complicated" paper, which she makes from strips of her hand-painted papers. The strips are lined up vertically (or horizontally) and glued down to a sheet of Lineco archival tissue paper. "I take ‘simple’ paper and make it ‘complicated,’" she muses.