Altered Silver

The CofA "assembly line" continued with the addition of some tiny collage pieces to several of the book's pages. Not every page received one, and this representative spread didn't receive any at all, so there's nothing to see for this step at this time.

The next run-through found me doodling a little something on each spread. Using my after-dinner-watch-a-little-tv time, a page or two of doodling was completed each passing day, and eventually, every (or nearly so) spread had a little extra scribble of something or other.

The latest step was adding crayons on nearly every spread. The idea was to impart accents of coordinating color, not to cover the best of the watercolor bases. This spread received some of the more enthusiastic crayoning; most of the spreads received a subtler crayon treatment.

As of this time, that's where this project stands. I've known what I want to do next, but haven't had a chance to implement it as yet. Thus stay tuned...this tale will continue!



Technorati Tags: altered books, art journals, collage, angels, mixed media

The next step in the CofA assembly line involved using the broad side of a marker to make about a .25 inch borderline around the outside edges of each of the pages. This side-view picture is rather blurry, but you can get an idea of how much more color these borders contributed to the general appearance of the book.

I have more rubber stamp alphabets than any other type of item in my entire art supplies, so for the next sequence I put some of those stamps to good use by adding some colorful words into the book. In some cases, I drew or doodled a word instead of stamping. Not every spread received a stamped word, such as when there was a shortage of space or for other considerations.

Another run through the book had me drawing a simple heart shape within the punched heart text pieces. It might not seem like much of a step, but taken through the book as a whole, the simple things add up.

And there was yet more to be done.




Technorati Tags: altered books, art journals, collage, angels, mixed media

Just when I decided to join in with Artwords group which offers a topic each week to illustrate or creatively build upon, they came up with this one: Graffiti. Hm, well, I don't do graffiti in the dictionary sense of "drawing or writing on public property," and I don't even live in an area with an active graffiti base of that nature. So I thought I'd have to pass on this week's topic, but as the first submissions were posted on the site, I realized I only had to (pardon the term) think outside the box...or beyond the concrete wall, as it were. It dawned on me that much of my collage art and even my layer-painted paper is somewhat similar to graffiti in that so much of it is built up in layers, one layer working over the top of a previous and sometimes cancelling out what had come before. I really enjoy that grunge style. So leaning on that sense of the term, I hereby jump into Artwords with this graffiti-styled altered book spread which I call "Finish Line."

 
The gesso-prepared spread was painted with acrylics, then a few snips from magazines were adhered.

 
The next layers involved strips of tissue paper, followed by an application of several rubber stamp impressions.

 
More rubber stamps. And some scribblings of chalk.

 
The chalk was subdued with a bit of water. A design stamped to a separate piece of paper was cut out and adhered into the spread. More chalk and a bit more water completed another layer or two.

 
Several colors of chalk were scratched around, subdued with water, then scratched again. A few remain visible, the rest have dissolved into interesting "shadows" of colors within the colors. Finally, a thin yellow glaze was applied.

Then it was declared finished. Happily for me, unlike the risk with graffiti in the field, no one's going to come along and whitewash this spread. ;)




Technorati Tags: altered books, art journals, collage, mixed media

While "Odyssey" is still underway, I've made a start on a second altered text project which I'll be working on in conjunction with the AlteredText Yahoogroup. Each month, we'll be focusing on altering four pages from Catching The Light by Susan Pope. I don't know if I'll be able to work on all four pages each month, but we'll see how it goes.

Having some time away from the studio and working from a scan, here's how my first page 168 emerged digitally after only about 90 minutes (one of the plus aspects of working digitally is not needing to wait for paint to dry). I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it came together.

I immediately fell in love with this page and decided to reproduce it into the physical book. The first thing I did was put down a layer of acrylic medium and let it dry. Liquid frisket (which unfortunately you can't see in the photo) was applied to the selected balloons and rivers and allowed to dry. I used strips of low-tack tape around the edges of the paragraphs where I wanted straight lines and didn't want any paint to go. After that, I could paint onto the page pretty carelessly without concern (although I should have also protected the facing page). This is the only photo I took of the process.

When the paint was dry to the touch, I stamped the words across the area. I started with the Beatles lyric, "love is all you need," but for the stamp size I was using, the phrase was ungainly and I was concerned about the acrylic paint drying on the rubber while I was working with it. So I cleaned off the many letters and reduced them to simply "love." That was stamped in a couple different colors, then the page was left to dry.

I removed the low-tack tape, and drew the borders with a Pilot gold paint marker. The frisket was carefully removed from the selected text with a crepe pickup, and I used the paint marker to add the upper and lower designs. The metallic gold looked so attractive on the page that I chose to go over the text outlines with it as well. I snapped this shot to try to show the metallic shine off the gold, but what it really shows is how messy the opposite page became, oops!

Here is the finished page, and I'm rather pleased with it. If I were going to do it over again, I'd try using watercolors instead of acrylic for the base colors to get a background effect more similar to the digital version. But frankly, I enjoy both of the versions, digital and physical, each for their own special characteristics.

And in both, I really like the excavated poem:

Love, love, love repeats, repeats.
The words return to know.
The words return to see.
The words return to...to power
in one small mot at a time.



Technorati Tags: altered books, art journals, palimpsest, altered text, mixed media

I knew I would need more than the four layer-painted papers I'd already made so I caught another afternoon to make an additional quartet. And this time, I took a moment to snap a photo each time I paused to allow paint to dry. The photos don't have the best focus, but they should be clear enough to see how cool the changes are as the papers morph along through the stages of the process.

This group of four (only two shown) 8.5 x 11" papers began as bright pink cardstock. Using a sponge, paint was applied in the colors of this project's palette (wine, gray, taupe, yellow, blue and black), one hue at a time. When all traces of the cardstock were covered nicely, foam stamps were applied in a seemingly-random collection of shapes and symbols.

The result is this warm mixture of all the project's intermingled colors. Eventually, these papers are going to be made into some nifty tags and other stuff to go into the APoH book.



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The Celebration of Angels project was moving right along. There were color and pockets, windows and shapes, faux die-cut inserts, cards and tags with envelopes prepared. It was time to turn the project into a kind of "assembly line" of various steps. Because each step is applied to the entire book, I selected one spread to photograph as representative for the changes occuring throughout the book. What happens in this spread, happens in all the spreads, with some detail variations. (Bear with the fuzzy images, but along with the prose, they should get the idea across.)

The first step began as soon as the modifications to the book's structure were complete, and it was to select and mark the five places that the angel icon tags would be positioned. To mark the spots, I used some thin scrap notebook paper which happened to be handy at the time; you can see one in the upper right corner of this spread. That scrap (and four others) serves as a reminder to not paste or decorate too much in that area (since it'll be covered by a tag in the future).

When those places were duly marked, I dived into the cutting and gluing of a zillion pictures and found text, like playing with a monster gluebook. The pictures derive from magazines, catalogs, other printed matter, plus a bunch of images printed from my computer. The found text came from books, magazines and junk mail. These items would be the bulk of the altered book's new content, and this step took several days.

When I'd added as many pictures and text as I thought the book could hold, the second step entailed going through the book from start to finish and drawing a marker outline around every object that I'd glued in. Doing this adds another hit of color to the page and helps the objects stand out more from the background.

 
For the third step, I watercolored over some separate text pages in various colors of the rainbow, then punched a bunch of heart shapes from the colored text. Those hearts were then glued into the book, and I re-drew all the object outlines with wider markers to make them bolder.

I would be going through the book from front-to-back (and from back-to-front) many more times in the steps to come.



keywords: art,altered-book,angels,mixed-media,collage

This altered book project, Angels Among Us (named after the title of the book), is really just an excuse for me to play with colors. It's a small (5x8", 127 pages) hardcover with many Gustave Doré woodcuts and various clip art angels used as spot illustrations. This book found its way to me by being a remainder under $2 that I selected sight unseen, solely on the basis of its title (if you've looked around my blog or website, you know I have a thing for angels). When I later held it in my hand, I could see how thin it was and couldn't imagine putting a lot of dimensional embellishment into it. I decided to go with some light collage and color - lots of color.

This book's paper loves water. It loves it so much, it just soaks it right up and shares the bounty as far as it can. Not a good trait; it's like trying to paint watercolor washes on thick newsprint. After that discovery, I chose to first cover each spread with a base coat of acrylic medium. That seals the paper and provides a great surface for the media to follow.

The next stage is to cover each spread with watercolors. Different color choices are made for each spread.

Then I dig into my digital stash, pick out a photo of a cemetary angel, prepare it to be used as a base sketch (very unlike a photograph), and print the alteration. I cut it out from the paper and glue it into a waiting spread. I really like bringing this digital aspect into the physical book. Sometimes additional items are glued to the spread as well, including quotations, other images and punched shapes.

The real color fun comes next as I go over the angel sketch and the entire spread with crayons and colored pencils. Other media can come into use also, like Zig markers, as long as it doesn't add bulk, although I may add a few dimensional items later.

I'm not sure any of the spreads are officially finished as yet, but for now there are these few worth peeking at and more to come.




Keywords: art,altered book,angels,collage,mixed media

When I got my first set of watercolor crayons (Lyra Aquacolor), I decorated quite a few spreads in the F&Ws as I experimented with the possibilities of the medium.

This one shows how delicate the colors can be. Just scribble on a bit of crayon, then brush out the pigment with water. I repeated the steps in various places to build up the color a little stronger.

 
For this spread, I scribbled on crayon and spread the pigment out with a wet brush. Then I scribbled on some more crayon and instead of using a brush, I grabbed a spray-bottle of water. The spread was sprayed a little here, a little there, a little more over there...until I noticed there was too much water dripping into the gutter of the book! I stuck the fold of a paper towel into the gutter to soak up the water there, then sat the book vertically to drain and dry. The result: very cool! It still kind of looks wet, long after it has dried. because of the smears and streaks of the paint. I was glad I'd used cool hues for this one.

Here's another spread that turned out rather nicely:

 
Upon the prepared gesso base, I just scribbled some colors down with the crayons. I had no particular design in mind, and I only chose these hues because I hadn't used them yet in my prior experiments. Then I went over the pages with a wet brush, releasing the magical watercolor aspects of the crayons. Definitely cool indeed!

But this became even cooler yet. Instead of stopping when the spread was dry, I added more of the same colors with the crayons, just as I'd done the first time. Then the wet brush was applied again. Then I kinda did it again, and again. The additional pigment moved differently the second, third and fourth times around, thicker and more palpable. I repeated the steps a few more times. The blending of the hues was simply delightful, and the colors began to glow with intensity.

I don't know if anything more will come of these spreads as I now consider the F&Ws to have been an excellent springboard for me, but with no particular need to "complete" them any further. They still hold some great treasures, and there are some interesting stories from their pages yet to come.




Keywords: art,altered book,watercolor crayon

I generally glance over the influx of wrapping paper in the stores at this time of year, looking for inexpensive rolls of nonspecific designs/colors that can be useful as paper for other purposes, such as in altered books and collage. Usually I'm attracted to solid color foils, sometimes with nonrepresentational embossing. Holographic paper is cool, too. For wrapping gifts, however, all it takes is some sheets of newspaper and a little acrylic paint. Here are some wrapping papers I made for a birthday earlier this year.

  
For each gift, I laid out a full sheet of newspaper, and loosely brushed down a base color. I kept the paint fairly thin and didn't try to cover the paper completely. Being able to see that the wrapping paper is altered newspaper is half the charm. When that paint was dry enough (almost right away), I applied foam stamps with metallic colors to make a loosely repetitive pattern. Additional sheets of newspaper were painted at the same time to accommodate a larger package (with the painted sheets connected to each other with acrylic medium). Then the paper was left to dry overnight before using it to wrap the gift.

For this package, I began with a white grocery bag and painted red, orange and yellow streaks from the bottom to the top of the four sides. I saw no need to paint the bottom of the bag, so that remained white. After the gift was placed into the bag, the top was folded down and two staples held it closed.

The ribbons could've been constructed from paper, too, but that would be a different technique to be explored some other time.



 

Here's a little fun activity I've been intending to do for a long time: altered text ATCs. Thanks to a recent discussion on the AlteredText Yahoogroup, I found the inspiration to give it a go.

The process begins with pages torn from an old paperback book, then large areas of text are snipped out approximately ATC-size, and affixed to cardstock with acrylic medium. The text is selected, then decorated. The cards are measured, cut out and the edges colored with a marker.
 

From the eight pages I started with, these are the seven ATCs that made it to completion.
  

  
Media for these cards include Pitt and Sharpie markers, colored pencil, watercolor, watercolor pencil and wax crayon.

This is as far as the eighth card got before I realized that something had gone terribly wrong...
Look closely. The text should have read, "In wine she drew a cup of courage."
Oops. All the words were present and selected in pencil, really. It seems I just got a little carried away in the stippling stage. So now this unfinished card simply acts as an example that yes, mistakes do happen.




My ATCs are not available for trade at this time.
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