Altered Silver

Here's a quick and cool background technique.

This spread was painted with acrylic paints in yellow, red-orange and reddish brown, in that order. For each color, while the dollop of paint from the tube was wet, it was spread and wiped with a dry craft sponge. Each color was allowed to dry to the touch before the next color was applied.


(Blog note: Alive and well, but I've been engulfed in a huge endeavor, leaving very little time for the usual pursuits.)

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

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

When we last left off with this tale, this "Very Special" spread had been pasted and glazed and was having a severe identity crisis. Soon after, some more stuff was done to the poor thing. Nothing all that "special," so don't get excited, lol.

After an acquisition of some new rubber stamps, this spread seemed like a fine place to give them a "test run," because when you get new stamps, you've gotta play with 'em. So without much thought or effort, I stamped "scratches" around in black ink, learning that the limitations of that particular stamp would be less visible on a much smaller canvas.

Then I stamped around on it with white ink, using a "crackle" stamp. This one had a pretty cool appearance, but would need more attention than I gave it at the time in order to appear more random.

Finally, I stamped the spread all over again with the scrolled design (in bright blue ink) as I'd done previously (before I'd accidentally wiped it out). ;)

And that's where I left off and the state the spread's been in for over a year. Is it finished? The answer's still no.

Will it ever be finished?
Hm...sometimes life holds mysteries without answers!



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

This was a speedy collage, completed in a single afternoon. The spread already had a picture on the recto side, which I'd loosely brushed over with gesso. The entire spread was scrubbed with a burnt ochre wash.


I began by laying down torn magazine and tissue papers, then added some printed text, a graphic of a pair of eyes and some more tissue papers.


I covered the spread with a brown glaze, and after all was dry, I went over it with a piece of sandpaper, gently sanding edges and paper wrinkles.

This is one of those items that actually looks better in person than how it appears in the photos. The text of this spread reads, "Arts Project. Innovations are changing your work."



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

I began this spread by looking through my rip file, a collection of images gleaned from magazines and books. Most of the stuff in my rip file was gathered about fifteen years ago. I keep promising myself I'll add the newer finds to it, but I just haven't gotten around to doing that yet. So when I went looking in the rip file a couple months ago, everything I found there was new and fresh to my eyes, not having looked at that stuff in some long while.

I selected a pretty image of a sunset to use as an F&W background. It wasn't quite large enough to fill an entire spread, so I decided to extend it with a bit of paint.

I laid the picture on the F&W spread, then used watercolor pencils to fill in the empty portion, trying to match the colors as closely as I could. Then I added some water with a small brush, to fill out the color areas.


A bold black border was made around the edges of the spread with a marker, then the image was adhered into place using matte medium. The magazine paper didn't like getting wet at all, so I ended up with a couple wrinkles in the image. C'est la vie.

The final steps were to add a rubber-stamped statement ("you couldn't be in better hands") and some wonderfully large letter stickers.



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

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!



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

This was a simple little idea that could have big possibilities. I started by taping some wax paper to my drawing board, then taping a sheet of white tissue paper over that. (The wax paper acts as a barrier to prevent the tissue from adhering to the varnished board after getting wet.) Carefully (because tissue paper gets very fragile when wetted), I applied a layer of matte medium to the tissue paper to help give the paper some strength and make it slightly less absorbant.

When the medium was dry, I put several layers of watercolor washes over the paper. I used sienna and ochre hues with no particular design. Thanks to the initial layer of medium, I could work over this paper a lot more strenuously than tissue paper would typically permit.

When satisfied, I let the paper dry again.

I divided the tissue paper approximately into halves, then took one portion of the finished paper and adhered it into a waiting F&W spread with matte medium.

I really like the way this paper looks against the gessoed text pages. I marvel at how it was such a simple effect to achieve, and although I used a lot of water during the color washes, none of that water makes its way into the book spread, a definite plus.

Since I had painted a full sheet of tissue, I have plenty of remaining paper (already painted) to be used in other spreads or projects. Too, I now know it's very easy to make more!



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

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.)



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

For this odd spread, I drew the letters in pencil, then colored them gently with crayons. To fill in the crayon, I went over the colored areas with a slightly different watercolor hue. The inner sections were colored with yellow-orange crayon followed by yellow watercolor, the letters with blue crayon then green watercolor, and the borders with purple crayon and blue watercolor. The variation in the hues makes a nice effect that unfortunately isn't very visible in the photo.

The final touch was rubber stamped (in green), to ensure that the letter F would never be confused with the letter E. ;)



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