Quite a while ago, my local art group made paper mache clay and then created some bowls. They sat drying in my studio for a long time but then I finally decided to decorate them.  If you’re interested in making paper clay, there are numerous videos on YouTube explaining the process. Here’s one that shows how to make it with supplies that most people will have in their own kitchen. 

This video is not actually the one we followed since we used matte medium as the glue. You can use your own homemade paste, wheat paste (that you can buy and doesn’t need to be cooked) or some type of acrylic medium such as PVA or matte medium as the glue. We used egg cartons for the paper but you can use whatever paper you have on hand.

You can shape the clay over a plastic or silicone surface. I used plastic bowls for my mold and covered them with plastic wrap (thin kitchen plastic) before applying the clay. The clay takes quite a while to dry but you can speed the process up by putting them outside in warm weather under the sun. You need to make the paper mache thick enough so that it won’t break easily if you are making a bowl.

Here are the two bowls after drying. The color comes from the grey egg cartons. These don’t have any extra color added. You can then paint or add painted paper to the bowls to decorate. I decided I didn’t want the shiny surface of acrylic paint so “what to do”? I had some natural inks we had made (again a long time ago). Amazingly, they were still good and not moldy. I had stored them in the refrigerator and we had added a small piece of clove which keeps the mold away.

Here are the bowls after I painted them with the ink. The bowl on the right is walnut ink. As the ink soaks into the paper, the bowl gets a little mushy until it dries again. I used a heat gun to dry it out so that I could go on to the next step. The bowl on the left is one layer of walnut ink and then one layer of walnut gall with ferous sulfate ink. I really liked the darkness that resulted and I’m thinking about using that bowl to display some 3D felt objects that I made for my Level 4 Stitch class. Hopefully, you will see those in the future when we have our exhibition.

I was left with deciding what paper to add to the outside of the brown bowl. I searched through my huge box of painted papers and right at the very bottom, I found an old “drop cloth” that was originally brown paper but had multiple colors of paint and prints and whatever got on to the paper as I painted other things. I liked that the paper when torn up, would not give any distinguishable patterns. Some people use torn single layers of napkin to decorate bowls but that looked way too commercial for me.

I made up some wheat paste, tore my drop cloth paper into strips and did more paper mache on the outside of the bowl. The process reminded me of my childhood making pinatas over balloons – messy hands but fun!

And here’s the result. I left the inside with just walnut ink.

And here’s the bottom view so that you can see more of the paper that I added to the outside. The randomness of the colors and the printing on the brown paper really worked to get the look I wanted.