Art Carriers for various mediums has been part of my Experimental Art for many years. 

A few days ago I did the pencil sketch on cardboard and posted it on this blog.  Cardboard is a blast to use and I get this zany feeling like I've done something good for the environment by converting its use rather than adding to the garbage in our landfills.

Have you ever tried using brown paper bags as an Art Carrier?  I have and it's a blast!

For a leather-like look (Examples of this process are rolled up and somewhere in my studio — when I find them I'll post a pic)

I opened out and flattened a brown paper bag, ironed it, squirted water on it from a spray bottle, ironed again, sprayed with water and then crumpled the moistened bag into a tight ball.  I let it dry for about 10 minutes and then opened it out flat, let it finish drying and then ironed it.  EXCELLENT!!!  The wrinkles maintained integrity.

Then using a large (4") house painting brush I painted the surface with a thin acrylic burnt umber, let it dry and skimmed over the surface with a cad red light.  Let that dry overnight and then came back to the surface with a gel medium and a palette knife.  The result was fantastic! 

To follow is a different application of paint and pastels on paper bag art.  In the 2nd pic you can see how I left one handle on as the means with which to hang the piece on the wall. 

My approach was again to open out the entire paper bag, paint the surface with some buff colored left-over house paint and then use pastels to lay in the images. 

The first pic is the piece in process, the second pic shows how some of my paper bag art hung on the wall.  I did these pieces in Sept 2004.