Winter ~ Page 2 :: Altered Book :: As the Earth Turns

Text:

Outside the house
a busy downfall of flakes
blew lightly
across acres of old snow.
Drifts piled up
over the sills.
Fence posts were hidden
and the farm
at a distance
was a smutted circle
darker than
the afternoon sky.

Ingredients:

Lumiere acrylic paints, paint chip cards, and Mizhuki cord, round household objects.

Lessons Learned:

1) The Mizhuki cord is a challenge to glue down straight. I used the gel medium which worked well and doesn't show at all even though I glopped it on.

Process:

One day when I was in Home Depot with my husband, I loitered by the Ralph Lauren paint chips display and sampled every shade of white I could find. It's really quite amazing how many different colors of white there are. I used a square punch to punch out the chips. After I organized the words to the poem, I glued them on the chips and set them aside.

I covered both pages with Pearl Lumiere. I used my heating tool to speed up the drying process. Next I gathered up a bunch of round objects from around the house that I could use to stamp with: a wine cork, a little medicine cup, an exacto cap, a plastic water bottle cap, and the top of a little paper clip holder.

I mixed up shades of gray paint and started stamping. I filled up a page with one type of circle, let it dry a bit, and then went around the page with another type of circle. When I was done, I liked the looks of the circle, but not the background color; it was too shiny white. So I mixed up some white paint with Golden's Acrylic Glazing Liquid in a ratio of about 1:3. I painted this all over the circles and it muted the grays and silvers and gave the page a softer look.

Next I glued down the silver and white Mizhuki cords and arranged the text squares across the pages.

Reflections:

This page is not the way I envisioned it. Originally I wanted to have paint squares all across the page, but I didn't have enough of them. I wanted to express the idea of all the different shades of white, which is one of the colors I associate with winter.

When I created the found poem from the book's text, I zeroed in in the phrase "and the farm at a distance was a smutted circle." You know how that is when the grayness of the day just seems to dissolve the edges of everything? That's the feeling I wanted to give but without using the explicit image of a farm in the distance. The muted gray circles take this idea to the extreme.

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