Sunday, June 18, 2006

The second page-the niche


OK, so for my second page I was trying the niche and using the using the gel medium. Needless to say I learned a couple of lesson's. First, let me apologize for the photo, the gel medium I used was gloss and not matte, Now I see the difference. The niche was not so neat, I will have to work on that. The labels were cut out of a cocktail napkin and I really liked them. Nothing was planned, it just sort of came together as I worked and I like that about it.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

My first journey into the world of Altered books


The first spread in my test book. I wanted to try the Olfa circle cutter to cut circles. I found that the cross bar of the circle cutter made it hard to cut the circle. I had to make sure the book was completely flat and that wasn't easy. I should have put the circles out closer to the edge. The circles on the right are cut out of two pages each glued together. The circles on the right are the cutouts.
I was glad that I cut the circles where I did since I ended up cutting the edges with a pair of those little scissors that makes a nice edging.
I kind of just did the painting on each page, let it sit a day. Then decided on the circles, let it sit another couple of days and so on. Nothing was planned. It all came together with the stamping last night.
I have so many different types of paint that I wanted to try a bit of all of them. I used an old Readers Digest condensed version book and found that the pages were a bit dry and when I painted on the gesso I got a fuzzy affect. Hopefully that was caused by the old pages. They are a bit yellowed and I noticed that they rip easily. From this point on I am only going to try base tests with this book and not waste time doing complete pages in it.
Next will be to test doing a front for the book.