In our flat we have a couple of drawers that until now have been filled with various letters and bills and scraps of paper. Recycling it into new paper for my film was a good incentive to have a clear out! I've gone through it and torn/cut lots of it up (still have quite a lot for future use, and I'm sure I can take other people's scraps off their hands if I run out) and soaked it over night to make it easier to blend up.
I've got my hands on some equipment now, including some 'sizing agent', to make the paper less absorbent for drawing on and something that will apparently keep mould at bay. Which might be necessary if it's damp for any amount of time! And hopefully I can keep any leftover pulp to use later too.
The plan is to try and vary the texture - or see if this is possible. So I'm going to separate my pulp into a few batches; some of which will be blended more than others. And then I can get round to some animation tests using the paper.
Batch 1: getting to grips with the material. Took a bit of fiddling with the amount of water in the basin to get smooth-ish sheets - but I think it's worked well! It'll be hard to tell before it's dry & I can get it underneath a line-tester, but I quite like some of the textures. I suppose it's not ordinarily desirable for the paper to wrinkle; but I tried out scrunching some of the sheets a little when they were wet to vary texture. Also incorporated some thread to act like veins...
Finished sheets - turned out pretty well with some interesting textures. Tried out some different mediums to see how they behave on the paper (it's a bit more robust than paper I've made before which is good, it's also a bit less absorbent so inks don't really seem to bleed). Next: some animation tests on paper to see how it looks under the camera.
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