Now that I’m finally feeling settled in my new apartment, I’m realizing that after all of the shelves and storage units have been put up and assembled, my wall space is still pretty bare. The couch has been sitting propped up against the loneliest piece of wall in the whole apartment. The time had come to dream up something fun to fill the space with.
Now here’s a secret for only you guys to know: I am a bit of a comic book nerd. The living room houses all of my comic books and action figures, so my boyfriend and I decided it would be fun to theme and create a mix media piece involving some of our favorite comic book images (we’re both still kids at heart).
We got together 4 medium sizes canvases and decided to do two each, then combine the project. Sounds simple enough right? Well, for our over-active imaginations, it become a bit of a problem. There were some images we printed that weren’t quite working for what we wanted and we were having problems blending paints the way we wanted for backgrounds. It was getting a little frustrating, because we really wanted these to come out exactly how they lived in our heads. After asking around, someone suggested I try using Lutradur Mixed Media Sheets and what a difference these made!
I scanned around FaveCrafts and found some projects and videos that were using Lutradur. Lisa Fuller’s Creating with Lutradur Video was especially helpful.
Let me tell you a little about this miracle paper. It’s a pressed polyester paper that is durable and flexible and amazing. It’s translucent, absorbent, and has a slight texture to it, which made it perfect for what we were trying to accomplish. Paints, especially paints that are a little watered down, seep into it in fun and unexpected ways, making it easy to create soft backgrounds. Painting it gave us the soft and textured background we were looking for.
Printing directly on the paper make the images come out a little softer and fuzzier. If you want crisper images, you can coat the paper with a clear coating before printing on it. Either way you get images that are textured and flexible, yet durable. This paper can stand up to being sewed, burned, stamped, printed on, and die-cut. It really is the most versatile paper for making mixed media projects or other papercrafts.
If you want to read more about it, you can check out this review on FaveCrafts.com. And if you’re intrigued and looking for project ideas, I suggest the Lutradur Flower, Spring Accordion Wallet, and the Mixed Media Pink Collage. After seeing these project ideas I knew that it was exactly what I had been missing in my superhero project.
Anyway, after playing around with a few sheets, we were finally able to get all of the effects we were looking for. Yay Lutradur!
And, of course, you can buy it right on CutRateCrafts.
