Worked on Altered Book Tonight

I am on a little ATC vacation as I had creativity block. Tonight after dinner, I was so tired. I am 90% done with a laundry marathon but didn't have it in me to finish the last 10%. I had even folded the washed stuff and put it away (no shortcuts today). Anyway, I decided to sit down and do a little art this evening.

My first altered book is a little square shaped board book. I had coated the entire thing in brown acrylic paint. The pages had brush stoke marks, that is all.

I painted each page today. I tried things that I have seen explained in books about making altered books. Here are some things that I did:

painted acrylic paint over the page then wiped it off with a paper towel

painted it over with a color tinted glaze then:

leave the brush marks

dabbed at it with a scrunched up piece of wax paper, lightly, to leave a pattern

dabbed at it with a scrunched up piece of wax paper, with pressure, to remove some of the undercoat, revealing a bit of the original page

painted over it with tinted glaze, then scratched at it with a pointed piece of plastic, scratching down to original page then a) left it that way for bright reveal of original page and b) painted over it all over again with tinted glaze for a more muted effect

painted with tinted glaze then dabbed at it with a piece of paper napkin, with unintentional result of pattern from napkin imprinting onto the page

I painted two two-page spreads at a time then used a very small hair dryer to dry the pages.

I then used rubber stamps on top of some of the pages, selecting images that I thought would look interesting.

As I said the background was dark brown. The colors I used today for the upper coat were pale pastel pink, pale lemon yellow, cream, gold metallic, bronze metallic, copper metallic, and a tan/coffee color.

I spent about 30 minutes doing this and had fun. It really goes by quickly, when working on such small pages. The pages are only about 3x3 inches in size.

On another day I plan to root around in my ephemera and ribbon and such to collage over this on another day.

This was great fun.

(My husband was giving me weird looks while I was doing this. Whatever.)

Oh then while cleaning up I saw that my husband put a great magazine in the trash, it was loaded with great photos and bright colors for collage. So I plucked it out of the bin. I have to be stealth about this as he already calls my ephemera collection "garbage collecting".

Someone back me up here, that I am not crazy. Please.