Citrasolv on National Geographic to make abstract papers

Yesterday I went to Susan and Sabyl's studio, and Sabyl and I played with Citrasolv on National Geographic.

Here is our table setup. You need something to protect your tabletop.  Sabyl had these nice plastic trays for us to work in as well, which worked great. We used foam brushes to apply the Citrasolv, but paper towels, or even just sprinkling it on would work. Make sure to use the concentrated Citrasolv (usually a screw top) and not the ready to use type (typically a spray top).  I put a lot of Citrasolv on mine, but it's a individual thing. We had stencils and bubble wrap that we stuck in the pages to make patterns. We also tried wrinkled plastic wrap but neither of us liked how those turned out.

The pages towards the front and the back of the magazine are ads that do not work with the Citrasolv. Some people just tear these out, but we found the magazine kind of falls apart and we would recommend leaving them on, so the pages stay in place a bit better while you are working. We just didn't bother putting Citrasolv on these pages, as they aren't going to be affected.  It is best to do this whole process outside or in a well ventilated room since the Citrasolv has an overpowering orange smell.

We put the Citrasolv in a metal (washed) tin since the Citrasolv dissolves some plastics (like the red plastic party cups). Since it does eat through some plastics, it could affect the plastic stencils as well. It seemed my newer ones were fine, but I had a really old one of thicker plastic, and it got a bit textured from the Citrasolv.

A lot of the pages have a lot of black ink so the final results will be very dark on some. If there were two pages facing each other that just had text, I would skip those as the photo pages made more interesting papers.

After applying the Citrasolv to all of the pages, we started from the front and went page by page. If we liked the page as is, we tore it out to dry. If it still needed more time, we left it in and went to the next page. The page that was skipped looked totally different the next time we looked at it. The more times we opened and closed two pages, the more muddy and mottled it became.

 Here are Sabyl's pages (Yes that is my finger at the bottom. whoops!).

Here are my pages. I used a magazine with lots of articles about fish and the ocean so I got a lot of blue papers. I got 48 papers out of one magazine. We ended up using almost all the floor space to dry papers. We used newspaper and kraft paper to dry these on. They do drip blackish Citrasolv, so the floor needed to be protected. The newsprint did not transfer to the Citrasolv papers and didn't really affect the back side of the paper so both sides were still usable.

 Here is what a lot of the papers will look like, kind of dark with bubble shapes.

 This one had a swirly stencil tucked in.

Here the Citrasolv only partially dissolved the ink so part of the original photo is still visible. I have a cool one where you can see a lady's clasped hands but the rest of her was mottled.

 Here is a plastic doily used over a close-up picture of a fish (the blue parts are his eyes).

I plan to do another magazine outside today on a piece of cardboard and just spread the pages on the grass. Not that I need another 48 pages, but it is so fun and easy.