This is the altered book that my sister started for our round robin.  It’s quite difficult to photograph them, as they don’t want to lie flat.  I hope I can come up with a better way, maybe a clear acrylic plate holder or something.

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.

After the leather dried, I painted it with acrylic paint.  They do sell dyes for leather, but the guy at Tandy, who was perfectly willing to sell me hundreds of dollars of crap I don’t need, said that acrylic would work just fine.

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. 

Here’s the cover I’m doing for my altered book.  I used a piece of vegetable cured leather, 4-5oz.  I wanted to have the look of cord-bound book, so I wrapped plastic over the book (to protect it from water) then wound it with twine.  I got the leather wet and stretched it over the twine to get that design. 

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.

Altered Book 7 Altered Book 6 Altered Book 5 Altered book 4Altered book 2 Altered book 1I started a round-robin altered book project with three other artists.  Each of us chose a book and altered it in some way.  I chose to alter the structure, and cut windows through the pages. I used paste and scraps of paper to reinforce them.  I made swinging wooden doors for one of the windows, and glued a picture frame into another one.  I want to incorporate the lock, but I’m not sure how yet.

 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.

Fish Paintings

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.