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Altered Books – A Glimpse Inside

Altered Books – A Glimpse Inside

In my last post, I showed you how we finished up the binding on our altered books. I didn’t manage to get photos of Louise’s book as she was still working on adding to her inner pages. Sorry, Louise. Here are the inside photos of the rest of the books.

Altered book cover with mixed media birds nest.

This first book is Paula’s and this is the back cover. This is her bird’s nest; part of her theme was birds. She had picked several words to base her pages on when she was creating the book.

Altered book with page of painted magpie by Paula Rindal

Here’s a page inside Paula’s book with a painting of a magpie.

Altered book with antique photo of building with men in front by Paula Rindal.

Paula has a bunch of antique photos that she used throughout the book. She also has some wonderful antique papers which you will see in all of our books as she is so generous.

Altered book with two painted landscapes, old book page and fabric strip.

These are some of the mini landscapes that Paula painted.

Altered book with antique photo of men playing cards on porch and stitched leaves.

And another of Paula’s photos with stitched leaves.

Sally's book cover

Now on to Sally’s book. This is her cover and Sally is planning on adding to her inside pages but hasn’t completed that yet.

Altered book with antique flower end paper and music paper.

Here’s Sally’s end paper on the left. Perhaps you can see the dark brown fabric where she stitched her signatures? The first page is from some old music sheets that Paula gave us.

Altered book with mix of papers including old typing paper and dyed paper towel.

Sally has a mix of different kind of papers in her signatures just waiting for her addition of eco printed paper and fabric.

Here are a couple of other examples of the type of paper that Sally used in her book signatures.

Altered book with original end pages kept in place of map of forest regions in the US.

This is the inside cover of my book. I didn’t want to take out this lovely map from the original end papers. So I left it the way it was. I then glued my end paper to cover where the signature had been glued in on the back side of the right page shown here. The map is what is stopping me from putting holes in the front cover to stitch some embroidery.

Altered book with screen printed paper on left and word printed fabric on right by Ruth Lane

Here is the end paper on the left that covers the glued binding. This piece of paper was screen printed with the deconstructed screening technique. It was my original inspiration for the color scheme for the book. You will have seen the fabric on the right if you read my prior post about how we printed the “backwards” writing.

Altered book with painted book page and handmade paper by Ruth Lane

Here’s another one of my pages. The addition of extra paper in the signatures splits up some of the page spreads that I made but to me it adds some interest. I am thinking about adding some poems and quotes about trees on some of the blank pages.

Altered book with pinecone original book page and antique ledger paper.

This page spread in my book shows the back side of one of the book pages that I didn’t change and an old ledger paper from Paula. If you didn’t see all my page spreads that I created for this book, you can see them here and here. Most of them made the cut for the final book layout.

Altered book with collaged papers on left and painted handmade paper on right by Ruth Lane

I really enjoyed creating this book and I’m looking forward to the project that we will work on in the coming year with my art group. We don’t have a plan as of yet but I’m sure we will come up with something!

Playing with Book Pages

Playing with Book Pages

I have been playing around with different techniques and creating a few book pages for the book I’m repurposing that I showed you here. This is another book that will be added to over a long period of time and these pages may change as I go along or might stay the same. Who knows? I’m going to make a bunch of pages and then put them together at some point. Some might not get used or torn up and used on something else. It is a fluid type process that is ongoing.

Repurposed book pages covered with alcohol ink covered packing tape.

Our play with alcohol ink left me with  pieces of colored tape to use and so I taped them down to a page spread from the repurposed book. You can still see most of the page underneath and it gives an interesting. Very shiny though, which isn’t my favorite look. It seems a bit overwhelming all on one page so this might get cut up into smaller pieces but for now, I left it as is.

Repurposed book pages with collage and natural ink painted background.

I had gotten a free trial from Golden paints of Light Dimensional Ground that I wanted to try. I painted it on the book page first and then added some different natural inks over top of it. The ground is supposed to be used to be a surface for watercolor paints on surfaces that don’t accept watercolor paint well. It is clear when dry and gives a bit rougher surface than regular paper. It worked well with the ink as it didn’t soak into the paper the same way it usually would. Then I added some other pieces of collage and a small painting on a ledger page.

Repurposed book pages with collage, painting and printing.

This is just one page as opposed to a spread. This page is gessoed first then painted with acrylic and ink. Next I printed with a small stamp that reminds me of tree rings and added another small ledger painting.

Repurposed book pages with collage and natural ink painted background.

This last spread has the undercoating of Light Dimensional Ground and then ink. On the right page, I added a couple of layers of painted tissue that was part of our mark making session.

You might notice that I am sticking to a color scheme this time, more neutral than my last book. Sticking to the tree theme though, I can’t seem to help that. It’s my favorite subject if you couldn’t tell.