Quick fun backgrounds & decorative techniques: Nicola Dunn

It takes more than the thought of temperatures rising to the high 20’s to discourage intrepid SLLA members and we had a full house for Nicola’s workshop on Saturday. The instructions said bring a plastic sheet to cover the table and an apron to cover yourself – sounded messy – just the thing for a hot, sticky Saturday.

Nicola started us off mixing wallpaper paste and paint, then encouraging us to make patterns in the lovely paste colours once we had applied them to paper. From here we moved on to shaving foam marbling – great fun and amazing what results you can produce with a can of shaving foam and some food colouring. This was followed by dyeing paper in various colours, results depending on how long we left the paper in the dye plus a bit of colour washing. Then the icing on the cake – making lotus fold and flip flop books using some of the paper we had dyed or decorated earlier in the day. 

You can tell when we are working hard as it goes really quiet. But all the hard work paid off and at the end of the day we all had lots to take away with us as well as plenty of ideas to use in the future. Best of all, none of this cost much as most of the stuff we used can be bought in the Poundshop or Wilco – good, cheap, messy fun was had by all. 

A big thank you to Nicola for a great day.

A full report on this workshop by Ruth Rowland will appear in the Autumn inc.