My friend, Arlynne, has become a wonderful source of inspiration for me. She keeps discovering or coming up with ideas to play with that are both fun and beautiful. The best part is that they are also very messy. I have a real fondness for messy play.

Arlynne was telling me about a great way to breath new life into an old piece of scrapbook paper that you may not like as much as you did when you first bought it. Actually she said this was a good way to dress up ugly paper but who wants to admit that they actually bought anything ugly?

You take the paper that you’ve lost interest in and you add paint and ink to it until it looks better. Arlynne’s samples were less altered than mine are. She lets more of the original paper show through and her splashes and swatches of color have a messy, distressed look. I was having so much fun adding the new layers of color that I seldom stopped until all traces of the original paper were long gone. Arlynne called her’s grunge but I started calling mine, “This is what you get when you give a monkey a paint brush and a lot of paints.”

I used a combinations of acrylic paints and glazes. Sometimes I added the color with a large paint bush. Other times I used a putty knife, a vegetable brush or my hands. Occasionally I used some sequin waste as a stencil and dabbed the color though the openings.

Arlynne also stamped over the painted papers but I haven’t gotten that far with these samples. I like them so much the way they are that I am not sure if I want to add stamping or not.

In each of these samples you can see in the upper right corner what the original paper looked like. That’s quite a change, Isn’t it? Now I need to decide what to do with my new papers. What would you do with them?