Altered Silver

Back in July, Jen Minnis posted (in the AlteredBooks Yahoo group) a link to her "Faceless" spread with a description of how she'd applied gesso over an outlined magazine image to achieve the interesting effect. It sounded like a cool technique to try out, so I searched a few magazines and catalogs until I found a picture of a lady who seemed like she might be lost in a personal reverie rather than just modeling a shirt (and she was a good size for the F&W).


Loosely following Jen's example, I covered a spread with a splash of colors, leaning toward pink to coordinate with the lady's pink shirt. I cut out the magazine model along its edges, then drew over it with a Sharpie. (Although Jen experienced problems with the gesso causing Sharpie lines to smear, I didn't have that problem.)


I adhered the magazine image to the spread (trimming the lady's head to fit the page), then coated it with a thin layer of gesso, streaking it outward in the same manner of which the background had been done. In this, I deviated from the steps Jen took; she described applying the gesso with a small brush, staying within the drawn lines. Me, I just used a wide brush over the whole everything because I wanted more of a spontaneous, loose, streaked appearance in the gesso.

Because of that deviation, I also had to include an additional step of re-marking the outlines after the gesso had dried.

This photo shows how it ended up for me.

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Deciding I really didn't want such an emphasis on pink, I covered the spread with a yellow glaze. When that was dry, I began marking lines following the background streaking, and tossed in some basic lettering to start (still using the Sharpie).


To tone the colors down further and give them more depth, I applied a blue glaze, which turned everything green being applied over the previous yellow. Then, having a bit of fun with the splendid variety of colors that were emerging through the glazes, I used chalks in various areas of the background streak areas to emphasize and accentuate the array of colors.

That play was followed by another blue glaze, to alter the hues even further. When dry, I brought the spread to my computer, with all my gel pens. I ran a search on Google for "dream," and filled the background streak areas with quotations and phrases containing references to dream or dreams or dreaming, references that appeared in the search results. I scribbled them onto the background with a variety of gel pen colors, opaque and metallic.


Here's a closer view of the finished recto page. Some of the outlined streak areas contain a single quote or phrase while others hold two or even three. Each phrase was written in its own color, and the colors were selected at random. (Some of them show up better than others.)



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