First 3 pages..

Earlier, I showed you an art piece I made, inspired by the book Taking Flight by Kelly Rae Roberts. Well, I've finally taken the book's advice & spread my wings. I tried something completely new - and not one of the tutorials from the book. I'm not finished, but I'm thrilled with the progress so far. Want to see?

When I first started making notebooks & joined Etsy, I came across a few sites on altering books. I don't remember which ones they are, but if you google "altered books" you'll find quite a few helpful tidbits. Basically, an altered book is an old book turned into a piece of art. Typically, this involves collage & paint, but can also include sculpture, hidden windows & pretty much anything you can think of doing with an old book.

I so wanted to alter an old book. But I never got around to it; I had a million excuses. Mostly, I didn't want to "ruin" a book - I love books way too much. Reading Kelly Rae's book (and a couple others I'll show you later) finally made something click. It was probably the line "you can't create something without destroying something first" - be it an old book or a perfect sheet of white paper.

So I scoured my book shelves & came up with a tired old copy of Shakespeare's Antony & Cleopatra (the signatures are even sewn into the cover!).

I've tried reading it & just never got through. I pushed aside the small amount of guilt & got to gluing pages together.

I probably should have glued all the pages at once, but I was impatient. I wanted to get to the fun part. So I glued together enough pages to make 3 layouts - and there's plenty of book left for more page spreads.

The yellow stickies are the pages I want to keep open. The next page will have a window with a small object inside. Not sure what that will be yet.

With each of the spreads I've decided to use, I've picked out a few words from the original text to work around in my new artwork:

Here's page 1:

Some of the words I chose to highlight:

For each of the spreads, I started with a collage. Then I covered that with paint in 3 or 4 or 5 colours. Then I inked over that with 3 or 4 or 5 colours. My favourite stamps are polka dots & flowers. Here's a look at the 2nd page spread at this stage:

I was so happy with this one. Once the background is dry, I sketch out & paint in a figure. I complete the piece with charcoal, more ink, paint & collage & some pencil crayon. Here's the completed 2nd page:

A closer look:

Here's the 3rd page:

Her envelope includes some original text: honesty.

I'm really excited with how this project is unfolding. I'll be sure to show you more along the way.