Tissue paper is one of those grey area products when it comes to recycling. Some municipalities won't recycle tissue paper because it often contains additives - like wax, glitter or foil - that are problematic in the recycling process. We can, of course, reuse tissue paper in our own gift wrapping and packaging, but in doing so, we can't be certain that it won't get thrown away.
Lucky for us, we don't need to throw away tissue paper or recycle it because there are so many marvelous household and creative uses for the stuff. I'll focus on some creative uses in this post.
Tissue paper is marvelous stuff to use in art because you can manipulate it and layer it in so many ways to create really cool effects. I'll show you some examples from my own work. I created these art cards using tissue paper:
Here, I played around with some tissue paper to create texture for a painted background. I painted some gloss medium onto a piece of paper, then laid tissue paper loosely on top, and pressed down lightly to adhere it. Then, I painted over the surface with more gloss medium to set all the interesting textures created by the tissue paper. |
I used red tissue paper that contains little pieces of coloured foil to make the crystalline paper in this bookmark. If you look closely, you can see the book's words through the paper. | Here's some crystalline paper that I made with green tissue paper and circles of white and teal tissue paper. I took the picture of the paper hanging in a window to show the beautiful translucency of the paper. |