good recipe for paper mache?

I prefer:

• Warm/Hot water
  
• Wheatpaste Wallpaper glue (not the vinyl glue becoming so popular today)
  
• A couple of good shots of white school glue (like Elmer's), but this makes it more expensive.
  

If the glue is to be kept and reused over time some people add a little chlorine bleach to kill the bacteria that loves to breed in this stuff and make it a stinky mess in a day or two. Some put the remainder in the fridge, some do both. Some people accurately estimate what they'll need and dump the small amount of waste left over and make a fresh batch of glue each time. If you do refridgerate your left over glue, warm it back up before using it - it is no fun to stick your hands in freezing goo, and warmer glue is absorbed by the paper better.
Warm, moving air speeds the drying of the piece, such as from a hair dryer - leaving it outside in the sun on a not-too humid day works well also.

The type of paper you use has an impact on the end result. Newspaper works, but tends to make weaker pieces that delaminate a bit too easily. I prefer a paper that is more absorptive. You want your paper thin but strong - a weak paper is going to tear easily under it's own wet weight and make a disintegrating mess quickly.

After wetting your paper, remove the excess glue, often done by running the strip between your first two fingers held almost closed. A lot of glue isn't going to give you the strongest construction - you want enough to hold laminations together but not to become a thick layer unto itself.

The secret to hard, light paper mache constructions (or any othe lamination technique) is using many thin layers, not a few thick ones. This takes time and patience. Laminations work because they combine the strength of one substance with the flexibility and holding power of another. If you wind up doing fiberglass/resin work down the road, good paper mache technique will make learning the new materials that much easier.

Almost any Paper mache construction that uses organic materials in the binder will eventually rot over enough time. You can delay this by coating the hardened object with a synthetic sealer, like Acrylic artist's paint or artist's varnish - Liquitex Acrylic Varnish works well (but adds cost.) If something is small, cost isn't a factor, or I want it to last a long time, I use very thin paper and stright Acrylic Artist's Varnish.

Large pieces want to lift at the edges and don't lay as flat, but to small ones would take forever and make it hard to make consistent layer thicknesses. The more curvature a surface has, the smaller the pieces are that will cover it effecitely - assuming you don't want folds and wrinkles.

PM can be cast in a mold or built on a positive form/armature, which is the usual technique, like covering a balloon. The armature can be removed later to reduce the weight of the piece.

PM as a ground holds tempera, acrylic, enamel, even housepaint well.

For a heavier but much stronger piece - consider cloth mache. This is often done by creating a traditional papier mache sculpture and laying several layers of soft cotton fabric (old bed sheets work great) in the same manner as PM, but you'll need a different binder. I've used watered down white school glue (buy it by the gallon) and Liquitex Acrylic Artist's Varnish, the latter being more expensive than the former. You may want to do a layer or two in white glue, and a finish layer in acrylic varnish. If you use only white glue, the end result will not be water proof or suitable for out door use. This is heavier than PM but inexpensive and surprisingly strong if done well (tightly laminated layers) such that I've nicknamed it "Poor Man's Fiberglass."

Best of luck, let us know how the set(s) turn out.

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Jeff F - Moderator
Magic and FX
Amazing the Masses

Cheap, easy, and effective? Yes.

If you are worried about the PM webbing over the chicken wire and drooping to show the structure of the wire, you can use thicker paper for your first layer and let it dry well before applying a second or third layer or use smaller mesh chicken wire.

I'd recommend testing the glue, paper, and chicken wire you plan on using for a relatively small piece of wall (say a 1-2 foot square or so) to see if you like the results you get, Don't forget to let it dry in the position the wire will be in when buiding the set so your test results match what you'll experience when building.

I have known people to use can after can of rigid spray foam insulation to create cave wall sets (much much more expensive) and sand or carve the solidifed results before painting or use traditional two part rigid polyurethane foams and have to deal with the poisomous fumes in such large amounts.

You can dip crumpled up brown paper grocery bag pieces into thinned down white glue. reopen the paper part way and assemble a rocky texture that way, or staple the reopened paper up and spray it with a watered down glue. It won't be nearly as strong as PM, but is fast and effective once you get the hang of it. For several Halloween parties over the years I've used the brown paper method to turn staircases into rocky corridors without the glue - just taping the crumpled and partially reopened paper up with masking tape since it was going to be torn down a day or two later. Several times I hit the hard edges of the paer here and there with white gesso or acrylic artist's paint and used a blacklight (UV) to get a glowing veined wall - like a "Uranium mine" look.

There are many approaches to making rock surfaces, but paper mache is inexpensive and can be durable depending on how much time you take with it.