A little chat about the nature of paper when gluing it down.

It's always a good things to understand, paper that is. When we hold a piece of paper in our hand we feel the smoothness or the texture it has. We examaine the size, shape and the possibilites with that paper. It comes in with many surfaces, a shine glossy look to loaded with words. One thing that it has in comment at all angles is that it's a dry product and when it's dry it usually lays flat. But add some water to it and it becomes a sponge and expands as much as it can in it area where the mositure is. When we want to glue or attach the paper together with any kind of mositure we have to keep in mind this happens. And when we brush on the glue it may go on thicker in some areas and some not. This creates the wripple effect when drying on a glued surface, as of some areas are not even and will have more glue then other. Well we all know that it doesn't work as well as we would like. Now being a collage artist I've used Yes glue for cards and small items with good results and great lay flat properties. And I've also use Lineco ph balanced glue along with PVA glue for book binding that for some reason it doesn't buckle much as all.
Am I making any sense yet about this? I hope so.
Now for regular collaging I've learned to coat my paper both sides, one side at a time letting each one dry. Yes the papers will curl a bit when doing this, you have to kind of pull them flat and let it dry. Then coat the other side. Now you have done two things One is protect the papers, especially the found papers that may have higher acid content from each other and seeping in the acid that can eat away at the papers. And secondly you have prepared your paper so that will lay flatter when you want to glue them down. After coating papers with a Acrylic medium they become tacky. As if you layed them on top of each other, they could create a collage all by it self with out your help. So I've used wax paper and now I've found the deli sheets very helpful and reuseable as I use the paper I created I can use these sheet again an again between the coated papers. Confused yet??? Hope not...
Well then if you move to the Heat Seal method of applying the collage papers you will need to use a Polymer Medium (gloss) which I use Golden brand and coat all the papers I use just like I've mention above. When all the paper are coated they will be little tacky and read for you to collage with. I arrange them in to place and use a silcone sheet or used avery address label sheet between the collage papers and the heat seal/tack iron to fuse them together. I will try to address this method some more soon. I just thought this was good for what some have been asking about. Also this is the guided method recommended by the National Collage Society in their last book, that is the method of coating papers I mean.