Summer ~ Page 12 :: Altered Book :: As the Earth Turns

Text:

In the afternoons Margaret went into the field behind the house and picked strawberries. They grew thick there by the fence and along the ditches, places where it did not break the grass for her to walk; in the corner by the pasture the small, wild plants made a bed as if they had been planted, and she could sit down and pick quietly, holding back the leaves with one hand and snapping off the berries with the other, dropping them into a blue-banded lard pail.

Ingredients:

Spectra colored tissue paper, cotton gauze, F&W Acrylic inks, crayons

Lessons Learned:

1) If I paint ink on piece of tissue that doesn't have medium over it, the ink bleeds like crazy. Duh!!
2) If I want the tissue to bleed onto the page, then I have to be careful not to spread the acrylic medium on too freely. The tissue dyes won't bleed onto the medium.
3) I was surprised to discover that the F&W inks will lift/bleed when medium is applied to them. I thought since they were acrylic based that this wouldn't happen.

Process:

The first thing I did was take a piece of artist's tape and cover up the text on the page to protect it.

I tore little pieces of Spectra tissue paper in different shades of blue and put them in a little pile. I was going to cover the sky portion of the page with them, but after I laid them down with the liquid acrylic medium, I didn't think it was very interesting. So while the tissue was still damp with medium, I used my handy-dandy tweezers and lifted the tissue paper off. I did it a little roughly so that some of the tissue would tear off and stay on the book. I also used the brush that I was using to apply the medium to the tissue, to pull some of the color off the tissue and spread it on the page. I applied the light blue colors, and then I wanted to add some dark blue dye. But when I tried to get the dark blue to bleed into the light blue, the dye color wouldn't come off. I think it's because there was medium on top of the page which formed a barrier which kept the tissue from bleeding into the paper. So I glued some pieces of blue tissue around the sky instead. I repeated the tissue paper process with the green pastures as well.

For the strawberries, I tore different shades of red tissue into rough strawberry shapes. I glued those down on the page. When they dried, I used a speedball pen and the F&W inks to outline the strawberries and draw the vines, caps, and seeds. I then glued some green tissue for the leaves and outlined those with ink as well.

I used some brown ink to dye the gauze brown. After it dried, I used the medium to glue it across the page. I was surprised when some of the brown ink bled off the gauze. Maybe I didn't let it dry long enough. I used a rag to wipe the brown away. I then took crayons and filled in some of the bare spaces around the edges with other shades of blue. I also used some red crayon to shade the pink strawberries.

Reflections:

Because the previous page was so neat and orderly, I wanted this one to look a little messy and rough. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet; it's quite a bit different from most of my other pages. But I really like the look of the strawberries. The green shadowing through the reds and pinks of the berries looks very cool. I wanted the gauze to be reminiscent of a fence across the pasture, but I think it might look too dark. This may have to be one of the pages that just grows on me with time. Or maybe I'll never learn to really like it very much. That's just the way it goes, I guess. It is what it is.

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