Altered Silver - art_books_manipulations

CofA : Shaping pages

noreply@blogspirit.com (Silver) — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 08:05:00 -0600

The book had color and pockets, but still needed more form. I intended "Celebration of Angels" to not be a book for sedate reading or simply flipping through its pages, but one to explore more interactively. So I had to do some deconstruction of its neatly trimmed and aligned pages.

A couple recent acquisitions would help out here, so my new Fiskars Paper Edgers scissors and Fiskars border punch were called…

Project: Celebration of Angels - Color and pockets

noreply@blogspirit.com (Silver) — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 08:05:00 -0600

For less than $2, as a remainder, I picked up a copy of Celebrities and Their Angels by Pat Montandon. Although some of the material the book contains is attractive and interesting, much of it is less than memorable. I decided to alter this book to hold some of the myriad angel imagery that I've been collecting for many years and re-title it: Celebration of Angels.

Because this is strictly a…

F&W : "Like A Great White Shark"

noreply@blogspirit.com (Silver) — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:30:00 -0500

This was a fun spread to create, using bits and pieces culled from unsolicited commercial advertising correspondence: junk mail.

I began by adhering one of those oh-so-important mailings, trimmed down to fit within the F&W page. Then I used chalks to give color to the spread, picking up the yellow from the junk mail's highlighting, then some blue to work with the blue that additional glued bits were going to bring.…

Paper Weaving

noreply@blogspirit.com (Silver) — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 18:45:00 -0500

Started the background of this spread by scribbling sienna and azure chalk in a kind of chevron design, then using a bit of water to blend it all together. This was followed by stamping with blue, brown, white and black inks. After giving the ink time to dry, I made several horizontal slices with an Xacto blade through the recto page in preparation for the weaving.

I had a brownish handmade…

Random Acts of Folding

noreply@blogspirit.com (Silver) — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 13:35:00 -0500

With this entry, I'm establishing new categories for Book-Backgrounds and Book-Manipulations to make entries on those aspects easier to locate. Every now and then, as I'm going along sealing and priming, I fold something. Most of the time, it really is quite random.

This is one of my early acts of folding, which is shown in the process of being decorated. The page-pair that would have been adhered together in this spot would have sealed up this photograph of a bridge in Scotland. I took the page that would have been sealed against the photograph and sealed it against itself instead, by simply folding it in half vertically. When I applied the gesso, I also added a few streaks around the Scotland scene. Later, I covered the three spread pages with some of the painted tissue paper that was shown in my More Deviations entry and applied a thin, light blue glaze over the photograph page.

At one point, I really got into the excitement of fold possibilities, and this spread is one of the more successful results of a spat of folding frenzy (you can see the many unfolds remaining from various experiments). In the end, this spread required four pages and was colored with crayons and chalk. There are four pockets available in the places where the red area touches the yellow areas and where the yellow meets the green. Only time will tell what the pockets might be used for.

This is an awkward photo because it was taken in the middle of a step and doesn't really show the construction of this spread. The paper clip is holding the two inner pages upright so that the just-applied glaze on the outer pages can dry in peace. The two inner pages are going to be forming pockets on the outer pages. It'll look a whole lot more interesting when I can show that step...

Another result of my folding frenzy period, this one uses 8 pages, and it was constructed toward the back of one of the F&Ws because I needed raw pages (those that hadn't yet been sealed or primed). I have no idea yet what will come of this spread (which is at this point only held together by the folds). There might be paint although I kinda like the pig pictures. There might be pockets...heck, it could end up with 16 pockets!

This is a rich-looking spread for which the photo does no justice. It uses 6 pages and contains four pockets (all in the upper sections). Mindlessly, I actually painted the pockets closed and had to reopen them carefully with the aid of a toothpick.

Here's a simple spread using 3 pages, the middle one of which is cut as well as folded (so it contributes less bulk). The paper is gift-wrapping paper which was much sturdier than I expected it to be. I achieved a close match to the wrapping paper for the back page by mixing burnt sienna and yellow ochre with a wee bit of titanium white on the page itself. The vague plan for this spread is to cover most of the paper with an assortment of stuff and to include extractable items in the single (obvious) pocket.

More to come.

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