Tales from Studio Mailbox

The First is Finished at Last

I'd like to report that while I was finishing up my "seasons" pages, I was digging around the shelves for last year's trades.  I wanted to look at how the overall swap was coming together.

And that's when my very first altered book fell off the shelf into my hands. Surely this was a sign from the heavens.  But I knew what was going to happen when I opened it, because it happens to every single person I show it to.  This gorgeous book filled with work from Finland, Holland, England, France and Germany has two gaping unfinished spreads in it.  And they're the first two pages you turn over in the book. 

It was time to finish this thing once and for all.

The slinky woman on the inside cover was starting to come unglued, so I pulled out the page and sewed her down.  This created a strange silhouette on the backside so I blackened her in, and used the little box to simply declare the fact that this is my 1st altered book.

I went nuts with the sewing machine on the next page and then painted in some of the loops, and then spray painted some dots over those.  Dots on loops.  Nothing special, but something I can either keep doodling in later or just leave it as it is.

Because this book is themed "Dreams, Hopes and Wishes" I wrote out how I feel about all the UFOs in my life.  It felt like the appropriate last spread to go into this fun book.  It feels so wonderful to have such a big project *finally* DONE!!!

Poems by Post

This last altered book I've worked in belongs to a woman in Scotland who's new to the group.  She prepped the sweetest little square book with a poetry theme.  I was the last in the group to work in it which means that there was limited space left as well as the other work in the book affecting the free space.  (At the end of a Round Robin you are challenged to work on the backside of sewing or rivets or wrinkly glued pages).

As I was assessing where I should begin, there seemed to be a recipie in the middle of the artwork.  Only then did I realize the original book was a cookbook!  (Duh).  It was then I decided that I needed to make more than one spread so that when she gets her book back there isn't this drastic "unworked" spot in the middle of everybody else's artwork.

So here's what I made in that small in-between space utilizing actual postage from the other members of the group.  I hope it's a good cheery compliment to her book and her theme...

Put Something In

I'm not much of a "poetry" person.  When people start discussing poems I start getting nervous.  I love art and all things creative so I'm not sure exactly what the problem is.  The hard cold truth is that I just don't "get" most poetry. 

It especially freaks me out if some of the poem rhymes and some of it doesn't.  I want to come up with new endings to the lines to either make the entire thing rhyme OR to make the entire thing NOT rhyme.  I have poem issues to say the very least.

So when an altered book came to me with the theme "Illustrated Poems" I started to sweat.  Because of my adversion to poetry in general , I began by focusing on the "Illustrated" portion of her theme and went to the bookshelf and pulled down Shel Silverstein.  These were the poems of my childhood.  These are the pages that inspired hours of painstaking doodles in attempts to re-create his goofy drawings.  I spent weeks trying to get the twists on those crossed fingers that illustrate "Superstitious" just right.  (A Light in the Attic, p. 48)

And then it was like magic.  I started going over his poetry through the eyes of an adult.  And I was shocked!  They are so brilliant in simplicity yet at the same time meaningful in a way I didn't see as a kid.  When you compare his books with the plastic, primary-colored world that children are surrounded by now, you've got black-and-white print in perfect balance with quirky delightful sketches. 

Below is what I decided to include in the altered book, which made me think about all us creative people who sometimes might just be taking ourselves way too seriously, as well as It's Dark in Here, p.21 from Where the Sidewalk Ends.  This seemed fitting for a poetry-themed book because it's a poem about writing a poem from inside of a lion.  Surely a place where all brilliant writers find themselves at times!

Put Something In  (Shel Silverstein)

Draw a crazy picture,
Write a nutty poem,
Sing a mumble-gumble song,
Whistle through your comb.
Do a loony-goony dance
'Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain't been there before.

Travel Altered Book

I've been working on a small altered book for bringing on the road.  I noticed while I was reoganizing my things that I have tons of paper ephemera left over from trips.  So I decided to try make a place where I could put the paper scraps immediately instead of letting them pile up into overwhelming heaps.

In between the spreads I've cut the corners of pages and then stapled the edges to create little pockets to hold miscellaneous stuff that I don't have the heart to throw out.

This last trip was a reunion of high school girlfriends at Moutain Lake Resort where scenes from the movie Dirty Dancing were filmed.  My book is the perfect place to put my checked luggage stickers, boarding cards and notes so that when I go back into it I will become flooded with memories of my crazy childhood friends.  Little details I might forget in a few years are now scrawled onto the pages and sure to make us hysterical with laughter the next time we're together. 

I love you Peers!!

Altered Book of Doors

 I was lucky enough to work in a book owned by an artist in Belgium who's new to our European Altered Books group.  Her theme was "Doors" and the size and shape of the book was really fun to play with. 

Normally I would dig through my very unorganized photographic files until I found a door picture that I wanted to develop the spread around.  But because I was so miserably sick during the timeframe I had to work on it, I was extremely grateful to whomever enclosed a laminated magazine clipping of concentric arched doorways.

 Using the shape of the laminated photo, I did the old "symmetric" trick where you make a horizontal cut to the center of the book's binding, and then lay the bottom half of your cut to one side of the spread and the top half of your cut to the other.  You could glue the split halves down at this point, or go a step or two further like I did.  I never glued down the bottom half of my split cut.  I left it flopping in the middle.  This later became the place where I attached the door image.

I am enjoying finding ways of making more interesting layers by playing with some of the pages that get sandwiched when you glue down all the different parts of the spread.  What I did on the left side was simply rip (vertically) half of a page from beneath the top half of the "split cut."  This left a rough edge.  Then I punched holes into this stub with a square punch, tucking some orange transparent film under the "windows" and then glued the ripped portion of the page down to the left background page.  Lastly I glued down the top portion of the symmetrical split-cut on the left hand side.

True to my stenciling obsession, I interesected the word "door" crossword puzzle style on both sides of the spread. I splashed watercolor over the text and then accented the lettering with water soluable crayons.  Lastly I finished off the flip-flop door by punching holes around it's edge and then finished it off with fuzzy red yarn.

 

Natural Goddess

Here's a fun altered book spread I just completed for the European Round Robin I'm currently participating in.  This one started out as a French music book. (Bad photo.  Note to self: take more than one "before" picture in future).   The book owner had thinned out the book but left various small shapes from the torn pages between the full ones.  One of these I trimmed into the shape of a butterfly wing. 

I carved a printing plate out of styrofoam and then repeatedly printed it directly over the sheet music.  I used a blue ink that came out shockingly dark in places and tried not to panic about the results. I had forgotten to get my "sign in" tag out of the back of the book and print it at the same time while the plate was inked up.  I had to go back later and "cheat" by inking up the printing plate with a stamp pad. 

Next I used some fun nature images I've had laying around.  My favorite is the hedgehog with curlers in her hair.  I thought it fit perfectly with the "Natural Goddess" theme of the book because the irony of beauty is that people desperately manipulate their hair, nails and body in order to look "natural." 

When the spread is first open, the butterfly wing lays over the frontside of the hedgehog hiding her curlers.  Once the book lays out and open, the wing pops up and actually looks like it's coming out of the side of the hedgehog.  That was a "happy accident."

 

My printing ink was so dark I had to use garden pottery markers to doodle over it.  Even they didn't want to cover but after a few coats, it worked out.  I embellished a little more with some fun transparent orange paper I had handy as well as some metallic pink butterflies that required stapling.  I stapled them at the edges, so that whomever works on the backside of the spread shouldn't have their work too interfered with .

I'm pleased with the result.  It's just a bright and cheery display of a funny image salvaged from an old print magazine.  I hope it makes people smile.

Click over to view more photos from my "Natural Goddess" altered book spread including the full view ...

The Queen in Green

From a discarded English newspaper, a clipping of Her Royal Majesty (in Australia) from the 70s.  Once I spotted the article, I knew her outfit needed to live on in my Red-Green book!  I'm not even sure how to enhance or embellish this... more pearls and emeralds...??

What I would give for that hat...!  Doesn't it make you wonder what shoes she was wearing?? 

This is seriously the most groove-a-licious outfit I've ever seen her in.  She looks so pretty and happy, whatever it was she was up to.  I don't think just anybody could have pulled that color off!

Trust Randomness

Is "Randomness" even a word?  My English is completely falling apart living here.  Most of the time I'm struggling with word order instead of actual vocabulary.  Sometimes when I go back and read my blog posts I think to myself: I wonder if my lack of readership is because I've convinced visitors that I'm illiterate...? Instead of speaking better German, I've actually managed to speak worse English! Schleckt!!  In any case, I simply mean to encourage you to trust in random techniques. 

Here, I created another spread in my Red-Green themed book using squares of stripey paper.  Normally, I would manipulate which way the stripes go to make a further pattern within the checkerboard design.  This time, I just let it rip.  Whichever way the square came out after applying glue to the backside, I slapped it down onto the page.  I want to start working faster, let go of control and maybe go so far as to blindfolding myself. 

If I don't post for days on end, please send someone over to get me...I can just imagine explaining to the confused German paramedics why I'm blindfolded with my limbs stuck together with gel medium.

Expression

Here is the work I did in an Altered Book themed "Artistic Expression."  This is my work for the first round of a European Round Robin that I'm currently taking part in.  Serena, (the book owner) did so many beautiful spreads in my former Red-Green book that I wanted to get some serious pages arted up for her during the longer than usual time frame where we were able to work in the books.

The spread is made by leaving some pages in-between that can be cut down into interesting shapes.  (Like a tip-in with wings). I square-hole punched one page, adhered "paper patches" to the backside, and then stapled a second page to the back, sandwiching and hiding the little squares.

Next I painted the pages with watercolor and water-soluable crayons.  A few scribbles with markers, a few stickers and stamps, a tiger-print vertical element and a altered price tag as bookmark.

The paper in this particular book was so excellent, the pages didn't need to be glued together or gesso'd.  This allowed me to paint, leaving text showing through as well as one of the original illustrations peeking through a punched hole.  Fun!

Backside of Spreads

   Am I the only person who's totally consumed with creating the backsides of altered book pages?  When I created my Holiday altered book spread, I punched little Christmas trees at the bottom of the page.

Because the book was already prepped and glued together, this means that the backside of that page also ended up having Christmas trees at the bottom of it.

Because the book is themed around the colors red-green, I had to think up a spread that could accommodate the tree-shaped holes.  I wanted to integrate the symbol of the tree so that the holes looked like they were intended to be there whether you're viewing the artwork from either side of the page.

So I made a spread honoring the Forest.  And no I didn't spell the word "wild" wrong.  "Wald" is the word for "Forest" or "Wilderness" in German!