Homemade Paper Portraits

I was introduced, a few years back, to paper-making with the Arnold Grummer paper-making kit. It's an easy way to get into making your own paper and my kids loved helping me use old papers, 'inclusions' and such, to create new pieces of paper.

Always a student of 'faces', and also mixed media collage, I wanted to learn to incorporate these handmade papers into my art. I began making some into portraits and others, I would collage or create a mosaic-type background and then paint over top (sailboats).

The Arnold Grummer folks bought a couple, used others to travel to trade shows one year and even commissioned me to do a portrait of their dad (THE Arnold Grummer! lol).

I've moved into other areas of art such as postels, watercolors, folk art mixed media pieces, but still enjoy those pieces of paper I've stock-piled with everything visable in them from dictionary definitions to phone numbers to novels (yes, you can see some of these inclusion book pages in my papers when you look closely)