One more month I join the Papelissimo Challenge of the Month. If last month the challenge consisted of making origami hearts, this time the proposal was to make paper pens to give them a functional or creative use. After thinking about it, I decided that I would take advantage of the decorative effect that feathers have to create the personalized painting that I had been looking for for a long time to decorate my bedroom. As I always tell you: search, compare and if you can’t find it… do it yourself!
Surely it has happened to you at some point, you have a piece of wall that feels empty and is crying out for you to put a painting on it but you cannot find the right one because it is either too big, too small, too expensive, or simply It’s not the theme you’re looking for. Since I updated my bedroom (you can see the before and after in this link), I was looking for a painting to put on the melamine furniture that I painted with homemade chalk paint (you can see the change in this link), but I couldn’t find any that convinced me , so when I thought about what I was going to do with paper pens, the light bulb went on.
I have always liked the fashion illustrations and dresses So… why not make a painting with this theme combining the same colors that you had used to decorate the bedroom? What I did in the first place was find an illustration simple because unfortunately drawing well is not one of my virtues. I finally found one that fit pretty well what I wanted so I traced the parts of the illustration that interested me on special watercolor paper, for this I used a print of the illustration made with a laser printer, a cotton swab and a little acetone.
Transfers that are not made on a smooth material but with texture as in this case are not fully defined, so the next step was to review all lines with a black pencil to draw, I had to do some of them by eye because they hadn’t even been marked. You can see the result below:
One option alternative option is to buy or print an illustration to later decorate it.
as my intention was decorate the illustration with a feather skirt of different colors in tune with those of the bedroom, the next step was to make the feathers, for this I used the following materials:
– Paper of different colors, in my case a light grayish blue, medium blue and deep blue or deep blue.
– pigments pearl powder.
– A brush to apply the pigments.
– Nail scissors.
Making a paper pen is very simple as can be seen in the following video tutorial of Papelísimo:
First of all, what I did was make feathers with the three colors of paper, it is important that the separation between the cuts is small to give a more realistic and moving sensation.
My intention was to create a skirt with gradient tones, so I made more feathers of some colors than others.
Next I applied the pearlescent pigment with a brush, thus giving them a pearly tone that enriched the appearance of the paper. For this I used three different shades of pigment: a deep blue one for the feathers of the same color, another light green for the medium blue feathers and a turquoise green one for the greyish blue feathers.
Next I was sticking the feathers from bottom to top, that is, first those at the end of the skirt and lastly those that were attached to the body, in this way they were superimposed with each other. To adhere them I used double-sided tape, although you can also use glue for crafts and to finish off the last line of feathers that is attached to the body (the grayish blue one), I made a belt with the same color paper and brushed it with silver glitter.
Now there was only place the frame so I chose a simple aluminum colored one and finished it off with a mat or box I made by combining two matching colored cards with the paper pens. In the following image you can see the final result:
The feathers create a very decorative relief effect.
Pearlescent pigments and glitter illuminate and add a more luxurious look to the paper.
My little piece of wall no longer feels empty:
What do you think of this idea? decorate a painting with paper feathers? If you want to see more ideas that you can do with paper pens, you just have to go through this link and see the proposals of the rest of the participants in the Papelísimo challenge.
If you liked this post, you have many more DIY ideas at , thanks for commenting and sharing!
