An Altered Book:: The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay

Cora's Brave Resolve :: Altered Book :: The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay

Text:

Cora's Brave Resolve

"Are you afraid?"
"I don't know."
"What shall we do?"
"Have another chocolate!"

Ingredients:
Dover clip art, photo from collage sheet, silk embroidery ribbon, gold Krylon pen, crystalline paper

Lessons Learned:
Don't spend a lot of time making background paper look beautiful if you're just going to cover it up!

Reflections:
I had to spend a lot of time cutting flowers, butterflies, and birds for this collage, but I didn't mind. I had such a busy week that I was too tired to do much more than mindless paper cutting anyhow. I used some plain crystalline paper I'd made and stamped over it with all the green shades of ink that I had and then proceeded to cover up the lovely colors with all the pictures. Actually, it probably wasn't a waste of time to color the background paper. After all, some of it shows up behind the text and around the edges of the page. Plus, it was fun to do, so that alone makes it worthwhile.

I picked out the picture of Cora from a collage sheet I'd gotten from Artitude magazine. I didn't want to use the original piece, so I scanned it and printed it out onto glossy photo paper.

When I was done with the collage, I punched holes around the edge, and used a tapestry needled to sew the silk embroidery ribbon around the pages. I love the ribbon. It's so soft and easy to work with. I like the way it turned out. I think next time I'll try threading some beads onto it as I'm sewing. That could look really cool, too.

Since I started altering the book, I've used the chapter titles to inspire the artwork that I do. The title of the book was what originally got me to pull it down off the shelf. When I looked inside and saw all the intriguing chapter titles, they just seemed to spark some creative impulses in me. I would look through the pages of the chapters I was drawn to and try to find a theme or idea I could interpret through collage. However, on the previous pages I prepared the text before I started the artwork. Sometimes the text has been a chunk of a paragraph I found on a page. Other times I've cut out interesting words and phrases and pieced them together to create something new. A couple of times I masked out other words on the page and just left interesting bits and pieces intact to create the poem. With this chapter, I knew I had to include it because I loved the title so much. And I knew immediately what I wanted to do with the art. But I didn't have a clue about what I was going to say with the words.

All of the collage was done and the clip art and photo were glued onto the crystalline paper. The edges were trimmed with gold and the silken ribbon sewed in place. And there in the middle was the blank space where I would put . . . what? I looked at all the pages that I had pulled out from the chapter. Over and over again I stared at those pages looking for a theme, something that would relate to "Cora's Brave Resolve." Days passed. I kept coming back to the words and searching. Still nothing. Finally, I started chopping out sentences that caught my attention and just laid them out on the table. I had six chunks of sentences in front of me, and then I saw it. Suddenly I knew what Cora's resolve would be. She would deal with her problems the same way I tend to do - by resorting to chocolate. I can't think of a better resolution! Can't you just relate???

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