Pressed Paint Wrapping Paper

It was my mum’s birthday recently and I wanted to try something crafty for her. Nice wrapping paper can be really expensive and so I was wondering if there was an easy way to create my own that would look even better, and be more unique, than shop bought wrapping. I thought the pressed paint method would be good to try out, because it is so simple and straight-forward, but can produce lovely effects.

This is a follow up to my previous post about pressing and printing paint, so I recommend you read first if you want a few more details about how I went about doing this technique.

I had some A3 sheets of brown paper that I wanted to use, because I thought they would give a nice rustic effect. Like last time, I put daubs paint on a sheet of acetate, turned that face down onto the paper and used a roller to press the paint across the paper. I then built up layers of paint using this method. For a few layers, I also used different scraping tools to add some texture to the paint (such as adding thin lines in the paint).

These are a couple of the sheets of paper I printed. (The photos didn’t come out very clear – sorry!)

And these are how the paper looked when cut down to size and wrapped around the presents. I chose parts of the paper that looked the most interesting when wrapped.

As I said above, it is such a quick and easy process, that doesn’t use many materials, and I think it makes really lovely and unique wrapping paper! It can look really effective if you use interesting colour combinations. It is so simple to do that it doesn’t really matter if the paper gets ripped in the unwrapping, but if you manage to salvage any paper, it can be reused or used in other art projects!