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

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

After making the five angel icon tags, I decided to make some little envelope-pockets for them to be slipped into. Here is how those were constructed.

 
Using one of the tags as a measure, I made a template from 20# paper by folding and trimming around the measure. A rounded corner punch and a circle punch helped to complete the design.


 
I folded a 9x12" sheet of artist tracing paper into six sections, then bound the folded sheet together with the template using binder clips. Carefully, I cut all six layers at one time. The unavoidable shifting of the thin paper meant that a couple corners weren't quite as full as they should have been, but they were still quite usable.


Following the template, the next step was to fold and glue the pockets. Then I decorated the front of them by stamping wings and a heart with Versamark and adding PearlEx powders. The wings were powdered in silver, the hearts were powdered with a coordinating color according to which tag each one would hold.


And voilà: five tags, five pockets, ready to be added into the book...as soon as the book would be ready for them.





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

It was time to prepare a few tags to include in the A Celebration of Angels altered book. I decided there would be a total of five tags. I wanted each of them to be unique, yet also of a similar vein.

I began on the computer, collaging together several samples of handwriting and setting it up for an 8.5x11" printout. I overlaid the handwriting with a layer of white lines to block out in-between parts that I didn't need to waste ink for, then tinted each of the five sections to a different color. Finally, the paper was printed.


I cut a page of (pink) cardstock in half the long way, then used acrylic medium to apply half the printed paper to the cardstock. (I have a bunch of this bright pink cardstock and no liking for it, so it's perfect for hiding inside other things, offering support without being seen.)


Next, the printed paper was carefully folded around the edge of the cardstock, and this second half of the paper was also adhered to the cardstock. The brayer was used to ensure the paper was firmly applied to the cardstock.

This was a sandwich-building method along the same lines as that of making the angel inserts for the book.

When the paper "sandwich" had completely dried, I cut out five rectangles for the tags, punched each with a standard hole punch, then used a Fiskars corner punch to fancy-up the corners. Finally, I colored the side edges by rubbing the edges against a silver ink stamp pad, thus vanquishing the last sight of the pink cardstock.

Now that I knew the actual size of the tags, it was back to the computer to set up five angel icon images and five quotations to fit on the tags. (Each of the quotations was prepared in a color to correspond to the colors of the tags.) These items were printed on parchment paper, cut apart, and silver ink was applied around each one as a rough border.


The quotations were adhered to one side of the tags, and the icons were adhered to the other side. I punched hearts from a silver foil paper, and these were added below the icons to add some balance.

The next point to consider would be to figure out how the tags would go into the book.



Technorati Tags: altered books, angels, collage, mixed media, paper arts

Although I kind of liked the way the blue watercolor appeared over the text of the wings cutout pages, I decided to paint over them since the photograph on that spread bothered me.

I used acrylic paint for the base color, then went over the spread with loosely-brushed chalks. The spread was then sprayed with matte fixative. Now I like this new appearance so well, I might not do anything more to it.

The verso of the window page also had a photograph problem, so I used a couple applications of gouache to help the printed photograph receed and be less intrusive.

As you can see from that last photo, the many images and bits of found text are also making their way into the book at this stage.

To learn about this project and view all the posted entries thus far, just follow the Project:CofA category link.



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

The construction of cards to add into the book was so simple that I didn't bother taking photos of the process.

I decided to make four cards, so I chose four images from my vast digital collection, brought them into my paint program and resized them for what I needed. All four images fit onto a standard-sized paper, including the planned borders. The outer edges were delimited by a pale gray line - dark enough to follow with scissors later, but light enough to somewhat blend with the paper. Within each card-space, I also included a banner design and a suitable word.

These preparations were printed onto pale blue parchment paper. The printed page was then sealed onto cardstock using acrylic medium. Also using medium, the back of the cardstock was covered with an angel-themed giftwrap paper.

When all was completely dry, I cut out each card (following the pale gray lines), then coated the outer edges with silver ink from a stamp pad.

It will be some time yet before these four cards are slipped into the book's waiting pockets. There is much else yet to be done on this Celebration of Angels project.





Technorati Tags: altered books, angels

The book had six pockets, but what would they contain? Inserts, cards and tags, I decided. Then I set off to create those items.

Some years back, a friend sent me a greeting card depicting an angel, and the card was die-cut to follow the outline shape of the angel. This was the idea on which I wanted to build my inserts, something like that die-cut form. Since I wasn't making greeting cards, the backs of the "die-cut" inserts would need to be decorated as well.

Working digitally, I duplicated some images into attached pairs, selecting imagery that would make good shapes to "die-cut." These were printed onto parchment paper two pairs per standard sheet, then I broadly snipped each pair away from the other so that each pair was on its own piece of paper. I used a light box to determine the fold position, so that each pair half would precisely align with its other half.

Aligning the fold along the edge of a piece of cardstock, I used matte medium to adhere a half to the cardstock. When that was dry, the second half was adhered to the opposite side of the cardstock. Inkjet inks don't like getting wet; the photo here shows how I used a piece of wax paper over the inked object to protect it from the brayer action.

When all was dry, I cut out each image "sandwich" (half1/cardstock/half2) and ended up with these very cool "die-cut" inserts. (The backs look the same as the faces, just in reverse.) Finally, I used a broad marker around the outer edges which covered the color of the inner cardstock and gave the inserts a more finished appearance.



Technorati Tags: altered books, paper arts, collage, mixed media

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 into play.
 
Two groups of six pages each were decoratively snipped down to add visual texture and also reduce bulk (even if only a little). (The group shown on the right surrounds the sole removed page of the book; what remains of the removed page is a thin strip that awaits some brilliant tip-in idea.)

I expect this book will contain numerous wings, and what better shape could there be to use for a spread of cutout pages?

I already like the way this spread looks with just the blue color and the texture of the text, but I'm sure there'll be much more to it as the project moves along.

And then, another bit of deconstruction that just had to be part of this project: a window. The peaked arch was cut through two pages, and a piece of acetate was sealed between those pages to act as "glass." I added some gold stars on the acetate for decoration and to partially obscure whatever will be seen through the window from either direction, a tiny peek-a-boo for interest.



Technorati Tags: altered books

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 personal project, I'm incorporating both copyright-free and copyrighted material, starting with the book itself and continuing through images I've gleaned from the internet, magazines, catalogs and other books. In deference to the included artwork, I'll be blurring or otherwise obscuring certain portions of the photos I share here of the project.

The book itself is thin (about 130 pages) and square in shape, about 7" x 7". The first step I took was to add color to the white, semi-glossy pages, using mostly watercolor crayons and also some acrylic paints. When all the pages had color, I sprayed each spread with fixative to ensure that the watercolor wouldn't run and that the acrylic wouldn't stick to itself. The process of coloring and fixing took a little over two weeks to complete.

I only removed one page as I went through the book adding color. What remains of that page is a thin strip on which I plan to attach a tip-in of some kind.

I've also turned several pages into pockets. A couple of them are simple angled pockets as shown here. Others are vertical pockets created by folding a book page over onto itself from the outer edge toward the ditch. When making the pockets, I snipped off most of the portion of the paper that folds into what will be the interior of the pocket, leaving only about a quarter-inch to actually fold over and be glued to its own "inside" (like the hidden hem on a fabric pocket). This provides a neat, folded-edge at the pocket opening, yet eliminates the bulk of the paper that isn't visible anyway after the pocket is sealed.



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