Saturday, June 15, 2013

Decoupage Monkey on my back...

I got lost in a reverie...I was thinking about Carol Grafton's brand new collection:

and speculating what it would be like to decoupage some of the images from that collection onto something—you know, like a serving dish. It took a little while, but I eventually realized that it was a pretty bad idea (however, those images are good for other things). I fell into a brown study in which I realized that I only had abstract notions about this craft- I had never made a decoupage, further, I don't think that I knew any other guys who ever had made one. Slowly the core question dawned on me—do guys decoupage?

Just a little snooping around the web turned up the obvious answer—of course! I found this great tutorial by Jeff Rudell:
http://www.craftstylish.com/item/41751/how-to-decoupage-a-tray/page/all

I thought that his perspective was quite practical and informative, and it prompted me to do a little survey of decoupagable (sp?) materials that we have in our collections. I think that my taste runs toward the flat and graphical, rather than the pictorial (thus my disqualifying of the Great Paintings of Food and Feasting).

Art Nouveau images and motifs seem ideally suited for decoupage. Check out:

on an ethnic or cultural tangent I thought these collections would work really well:
Russian Ornament of the Tadjik (048699788X)

Traditional Chinese Embroidery Designs (0486996042)

Now I'm hooked. Jeff has several other interesting tutorials about decoupage on his site-but I'm running low. Anybody out there got a favorite site for this kind of work they'd like to share? Let me know-I got a decoupage monkey on my back..




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