TORN PAPER AS PAINT

Torn paper as paint originated in a 7th grade class when I was asked to teach a Fine Art Class as part of the yearly curriculm.  In spite of the announcment that no funds were available and as I had volunteered to teach this class free of salary, I accepted the challenge.  My husband cut a 4'x8' masonite board into 18"x24" drawing boards and I discovered a stash of glue sticks and 150 outdated National Geographic magazines in the storage area. Voila!  Paint and binder.  All we needed was backiing paper for a support.

The teacher was able to get some fairly heavy paper and we were in business.  Frist we purchased several boxes of gallon-sized Zziplock bags and then began tearing all the magazines to pieces while paying special attention to the colored photographs. The printed pages we ignored for awhile and concentrated on piliing up torn pieces of color which we put in separate plastic bags. Tearing up things was very therapeutic and the students enjoyed this exercise.  Once we had accummulated a serious amount of color I went into the fundamentals of color and shades. Darks, mediums, lights. Compositional techniques, color wheel use,   etc..  

I took them out to the Art department of the local State University and encouraged them to ask the student artists questions concerning their conpositional techniques and current media.  From this field trip they acquiired a lot of inspirational information and ideas and were anxious to get into their own torn-paper project They  practiced with pencils on the scratch paper provided until they got the hang of it and then were challenged to choose their subject matter and begin to apply the torn strips while gluing them down with the glue sticks. The results were quite remarkable and very mature.

I used this technique myself (whiich is often classed as collage work) until I had found the clear acrylic binder and applying it on the canvas, picking up the desired color strip with my brush, putting it in place and brushing clear acrylic over it gave very satisfactory ressults and didn't need to be displayed under glass. Although I won several awards with this type of Fine Art with traditional representational application, some art groups didn't consider this a valid Fine Art because it was made of paper. When I reminded the complainers (who were all water colorists) that paper was what they painted on, they produced art on it,  and therefore paper had value,. They had no response.  Eventually I was invited to teach Torn Paper as Paint to the members of several art organizations.

Since that time, I have moved on to using recycling junk-mail, gift-wrap pape, string, dried rose petals and soft fabrics as 'paint' and see no liimiits in sight!