Pulled String Painting

The idea for pulled string painting comes from one of my friends. I was talking to her about making prints from string art. She thought I was talking about pulled string art. I described my printmaking activity in more detail, and she described her idea more. Two pretty different ideas – they both use nearly the same materials. Because of Aiden’s love for paint, we had to try this new technique.

 

Since I didn’t exactly ask my friend for instructions on how to do this activity, we had to experiment a bit to see what would work. I think it’s fun to test out different methods, so this didn’t bother me at all. I will describe both of our methods, but method two ends up being the better way.

You’ll need the same materials for both methods:

• paper
• yarn/string
• paint
• paint brushes (optional)
• scissors

Pulled String Painting Method 1

1. Cut a piece of paper in half. {You can also just fold the paper in half – that’s how my friend does it.}
2. Cut various lengths of yarn/string.
3. Lay the yarn/string randomly on half of the paper leaving one end of each string sticking out.
   
4. Add blobs of paint randomly onto the paper.
   
5. Place the other half of the paper on top of your creation.
6. Hold the paper down and pull out the yarn/string.

This makes for interesting art.

Although sometimes you just get a big blob of paint. We tried painting the string while it was on the paper. The string rolled around too much. Aiden didn’t like the result of this particular one, so he chose to paint over it with a brush.

Pulled String Painting Method 2

1. Cut a piece of paper in half. {Again, you can also just fold the paper in half.}
2. Cut various lengths of yarn/string.
3. Paint your yarn/string with a paintbrush or dip them in paint. {I put the yarn on a piece of cardboard and let Aiden paint them.}
   
4. Lay the yarn/string randomly on half of the paper leaving one end of each string sticking out.
   
5. Place the other half of the paper on top of your creation.
6. Hold the paper down and pull out the yarn/string.

Notice the only real difference between methods 1 and 2 is painting the string before you place them onto the paper. That seems to produce art that actually looks like it has strings in it.

We played around some more and produced the painting below. I think it is my favorite. For this one, we folded the paper in half, placed the painted strings inside, and pulled. We placed more painted strings inside and pulled again. We repeated this until we got the art below.

Have you ever tried painting with strings?

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