I’m not a big fan of painting with acrylics, though I use them for priming backgrounds in my journals/sketchbooks and, occasionally, for painting. I do, however, love to use them for dying fabric. Even the ubercheap (44¢/bottle) craft acrylics work well for this. I use about 10-20 parts water to 1 part paint. It’s not a precise measurement–you want to water down the paint enough that it doesn’t affect the hand of the fabric, but not so much that the color becomes washed out. It should look like a nice, rich dye bath. The reason I prefer acrylics over dye is that the acrylic will not fade. In fact, you can even bleach it without lightening the color.
So… I had some left-over paints from the Blue Book and thought I’d use them to dye some of the little paper scraps I’d reserved for making more miniature books. I got out a small mixing bowl and went to work. I combined a pearlized teal with phthalo blue, which made a gorgeous Mediterranean blue. The paper is absolutely beautiful, with just a hint of shimmer. My hands, alas, are also blue. I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, but I couldn’t remove all the blue dye.
red paper boat 