Jenn's birthday was in September, and I chose to use my newly developed paintover skills to make a little altered book for her. What follows is a basic set of directions if you're interested in trying it.
materials:
- a children's board book to recycle, with perhaps half of the pages randomly torn out
- photos printed out on an inkjet printer, in sizes that will fit in the book
- matte medium (not GEL matte medium, but plain matte medium)
- acrylic paints, the cheap kinds
- adhesive for attaching paper to paper, and if you plan on collaging anything besides paper, the adhesive that's appropriate for your collage materials. I used Mod Podge.
- a variety of sizes of brushes, for both broad coverage and detail work.
With a broad, soft brush, you want to paint the printed photos with matte medium, to secure the ink to the paper so that it won't bleed later when you're painting it. ***NEVER go over any part of the picture twice while wet during this step, or the ink WILL streak! Just paint from left to right the width of the brush, and then move below and repeat the process til you've gone from toop to bottom and the whole photo is generally covered with matte medium. When it has dried, which is fairly quickly, THEN you can do the whole process again but in the other direction, covering any spots you may have missed or only thinly covered.
Once dry, tear off the unneeded edges of the photo. I like to tear the edges because when I paint over, the torn edge adds interest and becomes part of the whole, rather than looking like a picture pasted to paper and then painted over. With a broad brush (an inch or so) paint the background, and while you're careful not to paint outside the lines, don't obsess about little booboos - they become part of the action and movement in the painting.
When you're painting the details of the photo itself, the important thing to remember as far as the facial and hand features go is to use paint that's diluted enough that the shadows and features show through the paint. I like to use diluted paints in the colors I've chosen and then, because acrylic paint dries so quickly, to come back and layer in darker colors, lighter highlights, and even a bit of blush on the cheeks and lips. The same can go for the clothing - or you can choose to be really bold and put the shadows and patterns where YOU want them, ignoring the original altogether.
Above is the very first page in the book - I used scrapbook paper for the 'bookplate', and for the collage of Mady, I just cut out a really cute picture of her, head only, and did a paper doll collage complete with silk ribbon and sheet music boots!
Mady when she was 2, with an envelope glued in for souvenirs.
Hannah with sheet music wings instead of the original pink thingies she was wearing in the picture.
Most of these cute pictures I just lifted from Jenns photo album on Facebook - when you copy and paste them into either Word, Publisher, or in my case, Macintosh Pages, you can drag them to the size you want and print them out just fine. I'm learning a lot more about journalinig and collage as time passes, and already see things I might have done differently, or items I might have added, but that's the nature of learning. You can't learn it all at once!!
I coated every page with Mod Podge, making them shiny, one spread at a time, letting each dry overnight. When I closed the book, I put wax paper between each page just to be on the safe side, but when Jenn opened her gift, nothing was stuck and the was paper was discarded.
For other imagination stimulating Mod Podge projects, you might check out
