Soft paper, when mixed with water, gum, or, better still, with flour-paste, forms a substance which can be moulded to any form, and which, when dry, will be as hard as cardboard. Its hardness and durability may be increased by mingling with it many substances.
Combined with soft leather in small fragments or with the dust of leather, it forms what the French call carton-cuir. In this, or even in its natural state—that is, paper and paste—papier-mâché, as it is termed, can under pressure be made as hard as any wood. I have seen all kinds of articles of furniture made from it. In America there are manufactories in which pails or buckets, tubs, firkins, and even durable boats, are thus manufactured. There is in Bergen, Norway, a church built entirely of it mixed with lime. For certain kinds of mending it is very valuable.
Though not so plastic as clay, papier-mâché can, with a little practice, be moulded into any form. It consists simply of pasting piece on to piece, pressing it meantime as much as possible with the fingers or a wooden implement like a pestle. The pressure should be applied as it gradually dries. Any one can thus make very hard cardboard with a bread-roller on a board.
If you have the cardboard cover of a book badly damaged, with even a portion gone, it can be restored by using papier-mâché in which a solution of glue or gum has been infused. Glue it specially at the edges. For such repairing take paper-dust or pulp, combined with gum-arabic in alum-water solution, or simply the gum. This is easily moulded and smoothed into any cracks or torn places.
If parchment be torn away it is easily replaced. Cut a piece to replace the missing portion, dampen it and the edge which it is to join till quite soft, then glue the two together, using pressure. I have just effected this myself with a cover of which half was gone, and the mending is hardly visible. Use the broad knife freely to press down the edges.
By combination with a mixture of nitric or sulphuric acid and water, soft paper becomes parchment-like and very hard. This requires careful experimenting, for its success depends on the quality of the acid and the texture of the paper. Very remarkable results have been obtained from this, such as material resembling ivory, horn, and tortoise-shell, in large blocks.
Waste-paper is so common and cheap that papier-mâché can always be made anywhere. It is well adapted to close cracks in wood, walls, or elsewhere; and for those who wish for an employment or amusement, it affords endless facilities. One of these is the mending or making of toys.
A common mask is made as follows. On a face carved in wood and oiled there is spread common coarse soft paper wetted, which is carefully pressed down, and more paper and paste added, till it is of the requisite thickness. It is then, when rather dry, taken off and left to dry perfectly. It is then painted and varnished. Should a mask be broken, wet it, paste glue-paper over it, and paint it again.
Papier-mâché is popularly synonymous with that which is trashy and sham in art, simply because its capacities and applications are not known. Thus leather-work was long despised as only affording imitations of carved wood. But in the hands of a true artist—that is, of an original designer, who applies, and not a mere artisan, who imitates or copies—papier-mâché is as much a subject for art as any other material. It can be used in many ways, more or less allied to mending, as are all arts. Thus paper in fine powder, or reduced to a fine paste—or pulp—can be, with a little practice, mixed with gum and painted with a brush on a surface so as to produce relief. A very little elevation or depression thus serves to produce grounds which may serve to give light or shadow to pictures. Thus pastel painting or crayon in colours rubbed in, which has always been, even in the most vigorous hands, a weak or “softly sweet” art, may be made very vigorous by firmly relieving and roughening the ground; for, as the great American painter, Allston, often strengthened his colours by mixing sand with them, so pastel painting which lacks “sand” can have it supplied by mixing it with the gum for the ground.
To understand this process more clearly, let it be observed that, as the illuminators of mediæval manuscripts gave relief and the appearance of solidity to gold by making a raised surface with a powder of gesso (plaster of Paris) and clay and gum, so this principle can be carried out to a far greater extent by giving relief to a ground. Here those of limited views, who never get beyond the merely artisan stage of art, will at once decry this as shamming, and as imitating effect by the aid of modelling, and not being true art, quite forgetting that all is true to genius, and everything more or less sham in the mere imitation.