Altered Book 1

For the past year or so, collage has fascinated me.  It’s a completely different direction from my usual art.  Altered books especially interest me, because it’s 3D art and because it’s recycled.

It does take some courage to actually destroy a book, but I consoled myself in that there were other copies for sale at the Goodwill.

The first picture is the cover, to which I added cutouts from scrapbooking paper, found objects, and gilded embellishments that I made out of fimo. It also has a textured wash of acrylic over it.

The second is of windows cut in a block of pages. I’m going to put something really cool in there, as soon as I can think of something.

The third is a digitally altered photograph, and a heat transfer of the same photo. The blue glow is from interference paints. I sewed the beads on to add 3d texture and to make it slightly more modest.

The card in the fourth image is from a deck of cards, either French or German, I can’t remember. The red crow on the right is a gum arabic transfer of the photocopy, which I took of a sketch I made. The sketches on the right side are done in ink and layered over with tissue paper.

The orange page with the poem is a piece I did in response to frustration about a rejection letter.

The last page doesn’t show the folded pages very well, but you can see the layered cutaway images of the trees. I don’t like using premade scrapbooking supplies, but I was away from my studio.

There are other pages altered in this book, but I’m not as fond of them.