r/upcycling • u/docricky • 1d ago

Ideas Needed! Upcycling junkmail

So I am getting a lot of junk mail recently, a lot from political flyers on pretty good cardstock. I'd like to reuse the card stock for various other art projects, but I'd like to cover up the print. I've tried painting it over with cheap white acrylic paint - doesn't work well on glossy cards, and isn't opaque enough. Regular printer paper is too thin, so if I glue it on top of the cards, the print also shows through. Would love ideas on how to cover up old print - ideally with a substrate that lets me use gel pens or markers on it, but opaque and flat enough to cover the previous print. Will experiment with black paint.

12 Upvotes

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18

u/miranym 1d ago

Prime it with gesso

7

u/catn_ip 1d ago

Don't try to cover the print. Use these for photo mosaic paintings. Just google and have a look at the images.

9

u/Minimum-Amount-1894 1d ago

This is pretty smart if you are into collage or mosaic. To piggyback with some advice to keep it neat as it can get chaotic quick is starting a small 5-7 drawer container tower with small clippings sorted by color and using those as a "pallette" to create with. For example cutting the fliers based on colors or images and then when you have a design in mind you can pull colors, shapes or images as you need them. This is actually inspiring me, my dad currently uses them as kindling for backyard fires.

Could also make little paper confetti with them. Decorate various things with that.

2

u/imperfectbean 1d ago

Use it for junk journaling?