Most creative hobbies require the purchase of expensive art supplies or equipment. This is not true of papier-mâché sculpture, so anyone can enjoy this art form. More and more adult artists are discovering this medium because the resulting sculpture is as hard and durable as carved wood, but making a papier-mâché sculpture only requires a few dollars in materials.
The sculpture creation process is also easy, especially if you build your sculptures around simple armatures made of crumpled up newsprint taped together. The only “real” art supplies you’ll need are acrylic paint and acrylic varnish to finish the piece and protect it.
In fact, all you really need are torn strips of paper, some crumpled up newspaper, a roll of masking tape, and some papier-mâché paste.
There are several recipes for papier-mâché paste, and they all work well. The easiest is the one I myself use most often. When you use this pasta recipe with several layers of torn newspaper strips, you’ll get a very hard surface that can be sanded and painted just like wood. To make this simple paste, put some white flour in a bowl and add enough water to mix the paste to the consistency of heavy cream. An electric mixer is helpful, but a spoon will do.
Some people prefer the more traditional recipe of boiled papier-mâché pasta. This paste will dry more clearly than the raw paste shown above, so the color of the paper will show through in the final piece. To make boiled pasta, mix a heaping tablespoon of white flour with a cup of water in a small saucepan and stir until smooth. Put the saucepan on the stove over medium heat and bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and let cool. The paste will be very runny at this stage, but will freeze as it cools.
The final recipe isn’t really a recipe at all. It’s just white glue, which you can mix with a bit of water to thin it out. Glue has the advantage of not being organic, so fungus and crawling bugs are not attracted to it. However, it is more difficult to work with because it will stick to your hands.
If you intend to make a papier-mâché sculpture that needs to be waterproof because you’ll be displaying it outside, you can find a waterproof carpenter’s glue at your local hardware store. This type of glue is expensive and will cost around $30 for a gallon container. It can be diluted with water. The resulting sculpture will be extremely hard, often even harder than wood. To finish an outdoor sculpture, you will need sea spar varnish to protect it from the rain.