faux granite woven basket

It started here. Spray paint on brown paper. O.K., grocery bags. I started using it in a book/journal project but then I saw a picture of woven paper.

I had to.

A woven basket.

It is so fragile. I love the metallic sheen, the nubbly visual texture...

Results of some painted papers

This is sooooo cool: I saw this on a DVD of Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's called Collage: Fast and Furious. (Great show.) She is very generous with video and photos on her blog, here. Anyway, she shows this on her DVD: drawing a white glue resist. I used watercolor paper here: The next day, after it had dried thoroughly, I sprayed it with blue and red acrylic water that I made:

And here are a couple of photos of the dried paper:

A side view:

And the paint, being acrylic, not watercolor, will stay put on the glue as well as the paper. Great. Don't know what I will do with the paper ... make ATCs?? make a little book cover?? Hmm.

Oh! And I have seen this done lots of times before and have never figured it out: plastic wrap wrinkle texture. One paints, lays plastic wrap atop with wrinkles, lets dry and Voila! gets great texture. So I did ...

... but got these interesting but veeeery subtle textures:

The gold is lovely, but only at an angle.

THEN, I discovered the secret: I sprayed acrylic water on the paper (so it has to be quite wet!)

And I used a color that contrasts significantly from the color below.

Very successful, n'est-ce pas? Come see it quickly, before I cut it up into some project.