I had so many comments on the painting I did that incorporated papers treated with Citra-solv that I thought I’d share the process with you if you didn’t already know about it (I didn’t until I saw Bonnie and Rosemary’s Show and Tell at the Studio). Here’s the painting – it’s a mixed media piece with altered paper, acrylic, and encaustic on a 16×20′ stretched canvas. Do you see the door in the middle? That’s a weird Citra-solv effect, very strange:

I used torn strips of paper created by slathering Citra-solv cleaning solution all over the pages of an old National Geographic magazine. The results can be fascinating. I’m especially interested in how you can sort of control the dissolution of the images by the amount of the solution you put on the pages. Here you can see that portions of the original image show through the distortion.

Citra-solv effects and result

Page with small amount of Citra-solv

Here’s a page done by artist Eva Macie that uses a lot of Citra-solv.

Christopher Staples has a great tutorial on his blog! Finally, here’s a link to a tutorial on the Cirta-Solv website – they are now selling their product at art stores like Jerry’s Artarama. It’s a fun process to play around with if you are into unpredictable results and eerie effects!

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