Wanna try faux handmade botanical paper?

Alexandra Otte
Alexandra Otte
When I stumbled upon some youtube tutorials for faux handmade botanical papers I was hooked immediately. I was dying to try it myself! So why not take you with me on this experiment? Maybe you love handmade botanical papers, too!

A very heartfelt thank you to Saacibo and Natasa from Treasure Books  🙂
I used both of their tutorials to get to know this awesome technique:
Faux Handmade Botanical Paper
Faux Handmade Textured Paper Tutorial

It is acutally quite easy and you can start experimenting right away!

What you need:
glue
tissue paper (paper napkins and/or kitchen tissue paper)
dried flowers, weeds and everything and anything you want to put in your paper
some kind of sturdy pad

First we prepare the glue and the tissue paper.

To achieve the desired consistency of the glue we mix it with water. The mixing ratio depends on the consistency of your glue. I mixed it roughly 50:50. We want a mixture that’s very easy to spread with a brush, but not too runny.
The easiest way to mix is ​​with a screw-top jar, which you can simply shake until the two ingredients are well blended. This is much easier and faster than stirring.
We need single sheets of napkins or kitchen paper, so we have to seperate the layers before we start.

Now we take one layer of tissue paper and cover it generously with our watered down glue. This is why we need the sturdy pad. Alternatively, you can also place a plastic sheet under each piece of paper you create, on which it can dry later.

Now comes the fun part! Create your paper. Put whatever you want in your paper on that tissue paper. 
If you click on the images you see, what I used for these examples.

Once you have placed everything on your paper, you add another layer of tissue paper and glue to seal it. Make sure to smooth out any air bubbles as best as possible. Sometimes it’s easier with your fingers than with a brush.
It gets all wrinkly, that is part of the look we want. 

Now we take our paper and set it aside to dry. If you don’t use a plastic sheet underneath you have to pull it carefully from your pad. But I did all pages without plastic and it worked fine. The kitchen paper is slightly more stable than the napkins, but these worked, too. 

To dry, I recommend placing a towel underneath to absorb any excess glue. This prevents the bottom of the paper to get too sturdy and glossy from dried excess glue. 

And here are our faux botanical papers! 

As you can see, the papers become quite wavy when drying. So I put them in a big book for pressing afterwards. 

Finally, I would like to show you some examples of what I have experimented with, the possibilities are endless!

I used black tea in some variations. I dripped the tea onto the paper with a pipette as well as mixing it with the glue to get an overall dyed look. For the tea and glue mix I used white cardstock underneath instead of tissue paper. I love the result and you have a ready made background paper for your next project.

I also used the tea bags for the top layer of another paper and love the result. 

 

I totally love how these pressed sunflower petals show all the structure. For this paper I combined them with purple faux feathers and some crumbled herbal tea leaves. 

Here I went with a lot of colour. I started with violet Brusho pigments and added purple feathers, blue Mica fragments and some little flowers and petals. 

 

For these papers I applied some golden flakes acrylic gel. 

And last but not least some examples of papers with some cute little flowers and petals as the main focus. 

This was an awesome expermiment and I am really happy with the results! Maybe I could inspire you to try it out and let your imagination run wild! I would love to see your own unique faux botanical papers! 🙂 

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