Altered Silver

In early September, I'd been buying an assortment of magazines for use in my just-begun gluebook, and in one of the kid's magazines, I found a text blurb saying "August 3 is National Watermelon Day." Ha! Never heard of this "holiday," but I really enjoy watermelon, so I thought it would make a cool F&W spread.

I wanted to keep the page simple in design. The spread was pre-prepared with gesso, which I decided to use as "white," and just added an angular section of bright yellow paint (which would match the magazine paper around the text blurb to come.) Then, continuing with bright colors, I painted a side-view of a slice of watermelon.

I wanted to "break up" the solidness of the yellow and white areas, so I used a rubber stamp of a vine design, stamping white over the yellow, and yellow over the white. Although it stamped crisply over the yellow acrylic, the stamping ink spread against the gesso "white" and lost details. I decided the yellow of the stamping was sufficient, however, for making the large "white" area more visually interesting. No vine-details needed.

The final step was to glue down the text item, along with a photo from the same magazine that happened to have perfect colors for this spread. Now the frog can be happy forever because for him, it's always August 3, and he can eat all the watermelon he wants!



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