Paste papers and young people.

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Before August starts I want to remember a “little workshop” on paste papers that I did at the end of June in a bookstore specialized in infantile and juvenile topics “Kirikú and the witch”, in Madrid, on number 17, Rafael Salazar Alonso street.

Here Olga Espartero and Lourdes Sobrino teach every Saturday an introductory course on bookbinding, helping with this activity to develop the children’s imagination and its love and appreciation for the book. They invited me to do a workshop one of these Saturdays, and we think about the last one of the course to celebrate somehow his end with colors’ games. I chose the technique of paste papers, because it does not need so many means as marbling and because, as they say... it is a children's game.

I knew that it is not so since I learned to paint these papers with Susanne Krause, perhaps the best teacher of this technique that can be found today in the world; certainly, she teaches with so much professionalism and rigor that the less one can think is that it’s a technique as complicated and fantastic as any other one could be. But going to the matter: they say that it’s a children's game, and although I am sure it isn’t, I was thinking that perhaps it was the more indicated technique to spend a pair of hours "playing" at painting papers. Paste papers. I didn’t know where I was coming…

The arrangements are not great, but people always look with expectancy.

My first intention was, naturally, to teach how to make some models which my students could adapt to its binding projects.

One of the typical rhomboid designs of this technique.

They followed me a little bit… at first. They learned to dye the paste, to extend it on a dampened paper, to draw with combs of diverse materials...

The principal thing on paste papers is that designs are not obtained adding painting with brushes or paintbrushes, but"taken it away" of the paper. With anything, fortune instruments, a sponge, clothing tweezers, the handle of a brush, or the fingers of the artist…

...and here finished the “academic” education because...

...when I said this Gonzalo went red in his face...

... and rapidly he interpreted "fingers" as "hands"...

... to end it up by trying... with his nose.

They all followed Gonzalo’s lead, and I devoted myself to admire the wastefulness of creativity of the group.

The effect was contagious equally on parents...

We all learned and enjoyed. Young people remained well satisfied with its paste papers that they will use next year in one of its books...

...or: perhaps its satisfaction was because the course was finishing?...

...Yes, for sure it was because they were beginning its holidays.