Winter ~ Page 5 :: Altered Book :: As the Earth Turns

Ingredients:

color photocopies of tree branches, acrylic paints, iridescent glitter

Lessons Learned:

1) Keep some kind of record, written or photographic, of your previous work. It was really nice to go back to my web page to refresh my memory of how to do the layering for the snow.

Process:

I cut a piece of scratch paper the same dimensions as this double page spread and planned out the shape of the snow fields.

I then cut out 10 pages from the book. I used these pages to make the layers of snow. I used my outlines from the scratch paper to cut the layers the way I wanted them. I actually made the left and right sides of the spread separately and taped them together in the back after they had been painted.

On my palette I mixed up sparkly white and gunmetal silver acrylics. Into this mixture I added my iridescent glitter. I started very light and painted the larges pieces of snow in the back first. For each additional layer, working forward, I added a little more silver paint so that the snow would appear more shadowed as it came forward. When all ten snow pieces were painted, I painted the book background.

After everything had dried, I began gluing the layers and the trees onto the page. I layered the trees between the snow banks and used thicker trunks in the foreground and thinner trunks towards the back to give the picture some depth.

I smudged some silver oil pastels into the snow for shadow. And that was that.

I took a picture of this page with my digital camera and used it in the window of page 4.

Reflections:

This page was much easier than the last one. It was very similar to the Crystal Bay page I did in the Motor Girls. I was surprised with myself that I had forgotton how to do the overlapping pages for the snow. Since I no longer have the Motor Girls book, I was grateful to look at the web site to refresh my memory of how I did that page.

This is my last "Winter" page. Spring is next, but I'm going to have to do some other projects first. I have some new jewelry ideas, and my dad wants me to make him a BIG collage for his house, and I've been collecting stuff for a series of collages I want to try with an Americanna theme. Time to take a break from As the Earth Turns!

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