My Altered Book Project

As I am not painting now (my four kids are all home for the holidays -yipee!) I thought I would entertain you with pictures of my altered book project, along with some of the techniques used. This was a project that I began in the spring, collaborating with 4 friends/students of mine. The idea was that each person was to choose a book to alter and a theme. Then each person would do 3 spreads (2 facing pages) in each others book per month and then we got together to have a play date (the most fun part of the project -we would share ideas and techniques we had learned) and then we would exchange the books. This lasted from May to November when we had our final wrap up party and got to see all the books completed.
My book theme was 'Four Letter Words' -the idea was not my own, I saw it on my travels through the wonderful world of the net. I choose a book called "Life On Earth" by David Attenborough to alter. It has great pages with a bit of sheen and tons of full page photographs. It was fun to see how each artist bounced off the images in their spreads.
This is my book cover. The numeral is done with light modeling paste pressed through a number stencil and then over painted with acrylic paint. The "LETTER" is made from some dimensional scrabble letters I picked up at a scrapbooking store. The "WORDS" is some fun foam letters that I painted gold. I spritzed the cover with a new favorite called 'Glimmer Mist' in an apricot shade. I put grommets through the cover with Cheryl's punch and hung an earring in one hole for a decoration. I decided to add ties to keep the whole thing together. At the ends of these gold chords I attached a gold painted acorn and a carving of a duck that my oldest son did when he was very little, both relics from our cottage in Ontario.

This is the title page of the book, in keeping with the word theme. I altered it by first painting the pages with Quin gold and red, and then painted it through a dye-cut letter stencil (again from the scrapbook store-got to love those guys!) with red and black, masking the Life and Art so that it wouldn't get covered. The silhouette was an image cut from a national geographic magazine (I have a PILE of oldies that I go to for neat images and text).

Enjoy!