This is the last set of pages of my art journal.

I was thinking about whether to work on my last entry in my art journal, or whether to start the collage project, and I ended up doing both. 

First I started writing out in ink ideas about what I wanted to try. This was both a way of working through the thought process, and creating a background for the artwork.  After that, I took two pieces of watercolor paper and started my collages. 

The two collages proved overwhelming for the pages, so after I trimmed the card shape out of them, I placed the frames on the pages to see how they looked.  I’d already done the crayon rubbing of the songbird (from the linoblock I cut) and I did a print on tissue paper thinking I’d use it for the other collage.  I like the way they mirror each other, and I like the way that the background text is just barely visible through the tissue paper.

Lesson learned from the art journal project: Art journals are very difficult to photograph.  Also, you can’t sew on any of the pages without sacrificing the watercolor paper background, which means you’re either not sewing, or you’re just gluing finished pieces onto a support.  The journal format also limits materials; you can’t choose anything too thick (poppy seed heads or doll faces) or too sticky (acrylic).  I’ve found this with altered books too.  The book form is really neither 3D or 2D, and has the worst of both worlds.  Of course, with altered books, you get the joy of recycling, so I may deal with the drawbacks and continue my other altered book projects.  Or maybe not.

I might paint the scene behind the door (the hinges work!) so that there’s some color, but I haven’t decided yet.  I have another month to alter it before I have to send it along. 

The door was extremely difficult, and I had a hard time making everything fit, even after measuring carefully several times.  I made the mullions and the frame out of thin scraps left over from our maple flooring. The glass is a sheet of plexiglass that I trimmed to fit.

I first painted the sun red, then painted over it with gold interference paint.  So now it looks gold directly, and red when you see it at an angle.  The moons and oak leaves also have interference paint.  Not shown, gold leaf stars on the spine. 

Since I put the water only on the spine, that’s the only part that really stretched. 

When that dried, I painted one side with water and tooled a design into it. 

When that dried, I did the same to the other side. 

Tomorrow, the painted version.

Mistakes I learned from:

When you cut into the leather, it leaves a narrow groove that the paint doesn’t want to go into.  I had the right idea of putting india ink into the groove, but it would have been better had I done that before painting the acrylic.

When I trimmed the leather to match the book, I hadn’t taken the plastic off.  This made the lines a little off, and the leather got cut too short on one side.

 I have a plan to tool a piece of leather and use it for the cover, but I don’t know if it will work or not.  It might be too thick.  Photographs of that to come.

For some reason, the photos uploader wouldn’t give me the ‘thumbnail’ option for this post.

Here is the latest page in my art journal.  I took pictures of it along the way so I could explain the steps.

Step One:  I painted watercolors of fish directly into the book, then photographed them so I could print the photos smaller onto cardstock.

Step Two:  I photocopied sheets of old stamps, coins, and Egyptian money, then made a collage.

Step Three:  I covered the entire thing with green tissue paper. It didn’t look very good, so after I did that I tore it off, leaving only three stripes.  After that, I painted it with a wash of half green acrylic paint and half translucent acrylic medium.

Step Four:  I had a photo to work from, and I started by sketching it on another piece of paper before concluding that it would look better drawn directly onto the page.  I tried to color in the flesh with a colored pencil, but it’s difficult to draw on top of acrylic.  I painted the shirt in with acrylic, then used a combination of soft graphite and sharpie marker to draw the outlines.  I adhered the fish with acrylic medium, and drew around them with marker and graphite to make them stand out.  You can still see some of the fish underneath.

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.

The title of the piece is Rewriting: An Armful of Tomatoes.  My analogy is that carrying an armful of tomatoes is like trying to write a good second draft; how do you get more without losing what you’ve got?

The fox is drawn in colored pencil. Why a fox?  I like foxes, and they’re easy to draw.