Decoupage is like papier-mâché for adults. Basically, you take a pretty picture from something like a magazine and paste it onto something else. You can also use napkins, as this book shows, to get really fine, thin images that look almost as though they’re painted onto the object.
Of course, the title of the book is Napkin Decoupage, but throughout the book the authors talk about serviettes. That’s because the book is for an American audience, and the authors wrote it in the Queen’s dialect, wherein nappies are a different thing altogether, although probably not without their artistic possibilities.
It’s a good book for ideas since the book shows a large number of surfaces you can decoupage images onto, such as chairs, shoes, baskets, boxes, frames, and so on. However, the techiques within are for experience decoupagers as napkin paper is very thin and hard to work with. Personally, I’m starting with manilla folders on two-by-fours to get a real flavor for the possibilities in pasting paper onto something hard.
