Claudine Hellmuth's Art & Soul class part 2

The second technique demonstrated in Claudine's class involved concentrated Citrasolv & National Geographic magazines, along with some paper kitchen towel and cling film.

The diluted 'ready to use' Citrasolv doesn't work for this technique, and I doubt if many other magazines would, either.

National Geographic lays down a very thin layer of gold ink underneath its printed photographs, and the Citrasolv and gold ink work their magic together and produce beautiful background papers; many of them look like works by Klimt as the gold ink seems to come to the surface but with many ovals splodges of other colours, as shown here:

Text and image transfers to the opposite page,
too, as you can see below.

It only seems to work if you do lots of pages together. Everything smells wonderfully orangey while you are working and also the papers will smell of oranges for a LONG time afterwards... If you don't like the smell of oranges, this is not the technique for you!

So, grab your concentrated Citrasolv, and use kitchen paper towel to apply it to a NG page - a generous coating, but not enough to puddle. Turn the page and coat the other side. Coat the next page, and the next, and the next, until you have coated the whole magazine with Citrasolv. Insert crumpled cling film (saran wrap) in between some of the pages - especially on double page photo spreads. These pages will have an interesting texture, as in the sample below.