Here in Italy people started to celebrate the Carnival and in some italian city like Viareggio (a small city close to me) there is the tradition to create beautiful, spectacular floats with the effigies of famous characters like politicians, actors and sports characters.
You car read more about the Viareggio's carnival here, but you have to know those beautiful 8and big!) effigies are made using a tecniques that here in Italy we call cartapesta ( Papier - Mâchè ). There are a lot of different recipes to make the _cartapesta,_the ingredients are various, from the vinyl adhesive to the flour to a mix of different glues, but the main ingredient is the paper! In my child, like every italian child, my teacher at school used to help us to create something using this tecniques and so, the first time I made it, I used some stripes of the old newspapers mixed with vinyl adesive and water.
In time, I tryed different ways to create something using the cartapesta tecniques, using recipes to have a sort of paper clay or just to use cover something using stripes of paper glued with a special mix.
Today I created some tiny houses using different layers of papers. I also painted the first one to understand how the colors work on the surface and the result was good:
I like the texture created by the different layers of papers because it's similar to the walls of an old house. To paint this one I used my oil colors and they created interesting shades of colors, so I'm ready to create an entire little village all made by paper _
In the following pic you can see the house before I added colors:
See ya soon with the other tiny houses _
Silvia
