Altered Silver

I wanted a bright cheerful yellow for this one. The mixture with Hansa yellow was a bit too lemon, but after giving the spread an orange glaze, it reached a delightful canary tone. Quite satisfactory.

The plan in development: strips of handmade paper for edge borders and enormous lettering. My chosen letters were enlarged to size by making several passes through a photocopier. That process gave the letters a fantastic grunge appearance, but these are being used only for establishing the layout.

After the borders were placed, I used an Xacto blade to cut out the lettering from a 20# yellow paper. The cutout parts are held in reserve while the main page can now act as a stencil. The blue chalk is there in preparation for the next step.


Using the new stencil as a guide, I chalked the letters onto the spread in a light, loose fashion. I also added some brushes of chalk toward the outer edges. After spraying fixative to seal the chalk, the cutout letters were applied into place, slightly offset from their blue "shadows."

Waiting patiently off to the side are two additional small pieces of the border paper plus a couple yellow plastic-coated paper clips. Before I can move ahead on this spread, I need to acquire a broader range of ink colors or figure out a safe way of using acrylic paint with rubber stamps. I know there are people out there who are doing it, but I'm wary of ending up with acrylics drying on the rubber. Research, experimentation and a continuation of this spread to come.



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