My first Altered Book!

Lisa – Step Outside Your Box Saturday – said: “There are just so many different kinds of books you can do whether you alter an existing book or make one from scratch.  Lets see how far Outside Your Box you can Step this week! ” She also put up a link to a gallery of some of the amazing books by Brian Dettmer. I was completely awe-inspired by this man’s work… I mean he carved a human figure inside a set of encyclopaedias!!!

So here’s my first attempt at altering a child’s board book, with 3D imagery, called ‘Looking Back’.

 

Yes, the “Eyes” from Third Coast Rubber Stamps had to make an appearance too! But, given that the book is about Mediaeval times, they assist in ‘looking back’… The shield and medallion are stamped on brown vinyl, heat embossed and the medallion has been coated with a thin veneer of diamond glaze to protect it.

The Mediaeval Stamp set is what I won in the My Time to Craft challenge and as you can see, they are awesome – good old Tandastamps! Here, I’ve used fired brick distress ink on a crumpled book page, spritzed and ironed it. I stamped the Knight and shields/lances onto white tissue paper and pva’d them onto the page so that none of the background detail is lost…

 

All of these images have been stamped onto card, coloured and cut out, then adhered to different pages for the 3D effect and finally, the pages were stuck together using Ranger cement glossy accents. The book page here had been painted with watercolours, from when I was doing my houses. Although it is very bright, and I wouldn’t do that next time (yes, I bought 3 board books, so I can make more!!). The images are really crisp though… and finally, I simply stamped this fabulous Knight onto the background paper (Dovecraft)  which covers the book.

That’s so clear, despite the fact that I just used black Stazon. Then, I realised that the spine of the book lacked a little something, so I found these amber coloured flat crystal thingies from a magazine that Jan gave me and I think they add the final mediaeval touch to this little book.

As the Artygirlz have an “Open Theme” this week, I shall enter it for that and also RattyTatty’s ongoing competition for Dovecraft – should earn me another ticket in the draw! 

I enjoyed making this book – it was challenging, to say the least – especially cutting the squares out of each page and then planning each stage of adding images. I also discovered that stamping on vinyl is fine. Heat embossing is good to, but it will peel off, which is why I decided to seal the medllion on the front cover… after all, who picks a book up and doesn’t ‘touch’ the covers and/or the pages? 🙂

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Posted by Rosie on May 1, 2008

https://alteredartandstuff.wordpress.com/2008/05/01/my-first-altered-book/