Hey it's May,

The 12 pieces of papermaking advice email series is going on pause for the holidays and will be back in January. Find some rest, relaxation, and time with your loved ones. Happy holidays to you & yours!

Onward to this week's tip:

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Tip #8 - Going Beyond Basic Papermaking

12 pieces of advice that I wish I knew when starting out as a beginner papermaker, with May Babcock, artist and founder of Paperslurry.com 👋. Coming to you weekly on Tuesdays.

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Did you make some basic paper at some point? And are you feeling ready to learn different, creative approaches that go beyond your one-color, flat, rectangular sheet?

Hold on—even 'basic' handmade paper has depths, history, and artistry to explore

Hand papermaking has been around for 2000 years, and you can spend forever exploring the range of techniques and fibers for producing basic sheets. Paper researchers have spent lifetimes exploring the world’s regional papermaking methods and approaches. Nepalese, European, Japanese, Islamic…even those categories are broad because papermakers have their own special techniques and processes they’ve developed over time and generations, and honed to local contexts.

If you’re interested in understanding specific traditional papermaking methods and using them in your practice, your best bet is learning from an instructor who is an expert in that tradition, and who has spent time learning and researching those methods. Now that I think of it, this could be a whole other topic that could be helpful for y'all—where to go to learn more about specific papermaking traditions. Hmmm......

What about artists using pulp?

Contemporary artists who have reframed pulp as an artistic medium in its own right makes for a wide, wild world of techniques to play with. There's individual artists developing specialized approaches through hours in the studio, those working collaboratively, and others teaching workshops sharing the methods only recently discovered over the past several decades.

The range of techniques is endless. Why? Because these artistic techniques have been developed through experimentation. Very broadly, here are some possibilities:

• pulp painting
• casting
• sculptural
• watermarks
• natural plant fibers
• …and even my own discovery’ of the 'pulptype' technique

Each of those broad categories have many methods and ways of processing specific fibers into pulp to achieve different looks and qualities to paper art. There could be even more undiscovered techniques out there. Maybe you'll figure out something awesome! 🤩

Creative papermaking and learning through experimentation

My recommendation to you, especially if there isn’t a close papermaking studio with workshops you can sign up for, is to start learning through experimentation. If you want to make paper that goes beyond the ‘basic,’ or use pulp as your art medium, it’s a very freeing to not have a “right” or “wrong” way to do things.

Pulp as an art medium doesn't have the historical weight that something like oil on canvas does. My undergraduate art degree involved a lot of painting, and I remember making one brushstroke and thinking about what that one brushstroke meant in the context of the history of painting. Yikes, I was such an intense nerd. Maybe I still am...hard to tell. Personally, I love papermaking for art-making because it feels so freeing, and because it's a relatively newer medium compared to painting.

In my own artwork nowadays, experimentation with papermaking tools, fibers, and methods are what invigorates my studio process. I also love mixing up papermaking with other hand-processes, like printmaking or cyanotype. It's a lot of fun, and I’m usually game to try out any wild idea or unlikely fiber just to see what happens. Granted, this ends up with plenty of 'failures' along the way—however, that's just part of the process on the route to finding new, unique approaches.

If experimentation sounds scary to you...

It's not supposed to be perfect! You're learning! It’s okay to feel awkward, be uncertain, and to make something that looks terrible or falls apart if you breathe too heavily on it. It’s your first time trying out your idea, so give yourself some grace and choose to do something new instead of something perfect. And, ironically I find that I make better work when I'm not worried about making it 'perfect' in the first place.

This is one way you can learn and grow creatively. This is the way I’ve worked my way up from only knowing the basics, to being the type of papermaking teacher who encourages students to try their ideas that go beyond what I demonstrate. If it fails, great! Keep experimenting, because that’s how artists have even come up with the unlikely idea to grab hold of paper pulp itself and create something new and beautiful and exciting.

That’s my advice on going beyond basic papermaking through creative experimentation, and I hope that this helps you out.

Alright, ‘til January,

May

PS. Here's the last pieces of advice if you missed it.

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May Babcock
Founder at paperslurry.com​
Artist at maybabcock.com​
Self-proclaimed paper geek