A Balloon A Day

I'm a freelance artist, mostly just trying to make my way in the world, but also desperately wanting to help change the way people perceive the world around us. A couple years ago, I started a project dear and near to my heart, "A Balloon A Day."

For years I've visited a place called Arts and Scraps. It's basically a real-shop/good will vibe's for craft supplies. They had thousands of different items from discarded color swatch booklets to cloth to stamps to sea shells to storage. It's one of my favorite places to go because you can fill up a large brown paper bag with almost anything for only eight dollars. You never know what you're going to find here and I love being able to repurpose things. On one particular trip I found baggies filled with dried flowers and I snatched them up. Had no clue what I would use them for, but knew I had to take them home with me.

The project got underway two years ago, after going to an art conference where I learned how to make home made paper from scrap paper. I didn't necessarily have the tools or the means, but I got an idea for a project made with recycled goods. All of the pieces began to fall into place at the end of the school year when I was helping my mother (an elementary art school teacher) pack up her room for the end of the year. We had this massive 100-galloon sized black garbage bag filled with all of the left over construction paper pieces that had accumulated over the school year and to my utter surprise, the whole bag was just going to go to the dumpster. All of that paper, just thrown away.

So naturally, I took that massive bag of paper home with me. I spent hours sorting all of the colors before I began the most tedious process, tearing up all of the paper into quarter sized pieces.

Next was actually following through with my idea, as most artists know the idea part of any plan is the easiest. The follow through and execution not so much, but I had all of this paper and knew I couldn't back down.

So I started making paper from the scraps.

First I have to make the paper pulp in a blender (shout out to Salvation Army for the $5 blender I found) which consists of one cup of ripped paper and one cup of water.

Next I pour the paper into the press and fill it up. (Bin from the dollar store, press found at Arts and Scraps). Depending on the piece I might use anywhere from one to three different colors. Usually, if the piece is all blue (aka sky) I add in a white pulp for clouds or I add green or brown at the bottom for ground or grass.

Once the press has a nice layer (I try not to go too thick or else the paper takes FOREVER to dry and isn't as easy to manipulate) I add in anything that I would like to be stuck into the paper. For most of the ABAD ("A Balloon A Day") pieces I use the dried flowers to look like balloons.

Next is the pressing part where I use a sponge (purchased at the dollar store) to soak up as much of the water as possible. There are two screens that I use to wedge the paper between. There is the thin black mesh like one seen in the picture below and a thicker white one. I sponge press BOTH side once or twice depending on how saturated the mixture was. I want the paper to be pretty dry before removing either of the screens. (I've found that the drier you can make the paper, the easier it is to remove the screens and the lower risk of tearing.)

After pressing I then let them sit flat to dry. This process can take anywhere from 4-24 hours depending on how saturated the paper mixture was and how large the piece is. (The image below is actually an 11x14 inch piece, I had to take two smaller pieces and fuse them together while they were still wet to create one really large piece.)

After spending an entire day of making a bunch of different colored papers, I had no clue what I was going to do with them. I knew I wanted people on them, but drawing faces has never really been my strong suit since I've spent so much time focusing on animals.

That's when it hit me, the people could be faceless for anonymity. The project would be for mental health awareness. I would do the bare minimum of features so these people, these individuals could be anyone. Mental health affects so many people and no one is talking about it. It's still something that is considered so taboo even though it shouldn't be. Just like any part of our body, our brains can get sick too.

The balloons in pieces represent hope and life.

The facelessness represents the anonymity, of how anyone you know can be affected by a mental illness.

The ripped paper represents how even though we may feel broken when all of the pieces come together at the end of the day we are still beautiful.

The different colored clothing represents for different types of mental illnesses.

And so the ABAD project was born.

I donate 10% of all proceeds from this project to Active Minds, an organization dedicated to helping advocate and inform about mental health to young adults.

You can clean more about Active Minds by going to: activeminds.org

To check out more of the "A Balloon A Day" project please visit by etsy page at LynseyCreations.