Books & Art

I didn't plan to play in the Studio today, but that seems to be when I have the most fun. I worked on aging or altering books. The two larger books were bound already - part of our Bytown Book Artists excercise to do long-stitch bindings. The text pages are scrap paper which I have used to "clean" stamps and paint brushes on, etc. These become pretty interesting over time. The backs of these pages include old Cirque painting schedules, copies of employee time sheets from Performance Printing (yikes! talk about from another life!) and much older stuff. I paint over some of the pages so that I can write on top of them legibly. The covers are decorative heavy papers that I picked up at a craft store. They have been ripped, stained, painted, collaged, stamped and written on to make them even more interesting than they already were. The books have "metal" bands that hold them closed. These are made by putting real metal ducting tape on the back of the same cover papers, taping them into a loop, writing into the tape with a stylus to make a blind impression and finally aging with alcohol inks.

The smaller notepad is something I picked up at Chapters - nice enough in itself, but now much more interesting and grungy ( : This book was stained, stamped, painted, written on and collaged. The frame on the front cover is an old cardboard slide mount. I finally tried out the metal paint and rust finisher which worked great on this little frame. The picture inside is one that I came up with this morning...and extension of last night's creative photo altering episode on my iMac. Photo Booth is SO GREAT!!! There is a high gloss gel medium over the "slide" which hasn't quite dried in this photo. It will be completely clear and solid when it does dry.

front view

back view

back/inside view with "metal" bands removed

Now it's time to move on to the Diorama which has progressed at last.

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