Altered Silver

After playing with acrylic paint for awhile, the brushwater takes on some interesting colors. This water is destined to be disposed, but it can assist in transforming plain paper into something more special.


When my brushwater becomes very saturated, I grab a couple sheets of solid tone paper. I crush, crumple, twist and otherwise mutilate the paper short of tearing it. Then I simply put the paper into the brushwater, sometimes in a crumpled ball, sometimes folded, making sure every part of the paper gets touched by the water.

Now the paper sits in the brushwater for at least a half hour; the longer it remains, the more intense the results can be. Meanwhile, I prepare a section of the kitchen countertop by laying down a sheet of plastic large enough for whatever size the soaking paper is (usually 2 sheets of 8.5x11"), then cover the plastic with several layers of newpaper. On top of the newspaper, I add two paper towels opened flat.

When the paper has soaked long enough, I remove it from the brushwater carefully (one piece at a time) and gently squeeze most of the water out of it while holding it between my palms over a sink. The paper is extremely fragile at this time, being full of liquid. When most of the water has dripped off from the squeezing, I open the paper so-very-carefully and lay it flat over the prepared paper toweling. When it's nicely flat, I overlay the paper with another layer of paper toweling and press and smooth on/through that top layer (so that I'm only touching the paper towel, not the wet paper). This helps flatten the larger folds and crinkles, plus extracts more moisture (which is going into the paper towels and the newspapers). After pressing and smoothing for a bit, the entire works is left alone to dry (with the top layer of paper towel still in place).

After about an hour (more or less), the paper is dry and the resulting decorated paper can be viewed and worked with. The paper could also be ironed to remove the last bits of crinkles, if desired.


This works pretty well on every color of 20# paper I've tried (from very light to very dark) though naturally, the results will also depend on the color(s) of the brushwater. When I had a pale yellow brushwater, I used white paper scraps. For the wrapping paper (shown in the photo in both untouched and brushwatered versions) the brushwater was just a blah kind of mud-color, yet it reacted with the paper in a quite pleasant manner.

All of the newly decorated papers will find their way into my collages and altered books at some point.



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