Journal Playground Week 2

In week 2 of Journal Playground we had to take an old book and give it new life. I had this boys book from 1936. the pages are so thick, when you rip them, they are quite fluffy . I love using them. 

I had already taken out and used a few pages, but to use the book as an art journal I needed to take a whole lot more. However I did keep this page. 

I broke into the spine and found lots of the original stitching was broken, so before I could add in pages of my own I would either need to repair or replace old stitching. 

I decided to take out all the old stitching, select the pages I was keeping and add in some pages of my own. These 'new' pages were kraft paper, acrylic paper, tracing paper, graph paper and some old painted pages. I stitched everything back together using coptic stitch. 

Once the pages were glued and taped back in, i could start on the cover. I really liked the cover of this book so I didn't want to cover it fully. So I went my own way with this one. The title of the book was heavily embossed, so to level it I added grunge paste over it. Once dry I sanded that and painted it then I could add my own title with a posca pen. I also glued on a bit of one of the pages. 

over the text I sketched out and coloured this face. 

On the spine I started this lil owl. 

This is how it ended up. 

I left the back pretty plain, just adding a little text paper to keep the theme running over the covers. 

Now for a page inside. part of what Kylie showed was a girl with a bird. I liked the idea of it but didn't want to replicate it. So I looked for an image online and found this one. I printed it out. 

I spritzed it very lightly just to encourage some of the ink to seep through to the back, then I dried it. This is the back of the print. 

I added a thin layer of matte medium, then I coloured the girl using Pitt pens. Then I added about 7 thin layers of matte medium... all of this is on the BACK of the print. 

Next I turned it over and added water so that i could rub the FRONT away, This removes the print COMPLETELY, all you are left with is your colouring in. 

See none of the print is left, no outlines, nothing, just my colouring in. This is now a floppy gel skin. 

I glued the skin into my book and added stencilling. 

More stencilling.. 

Stamping with a wooden Personal Impressions star stamp. I then outlined some stars with white posca pen. 

and finally added a title from PaperArtsy ESN 15.

Another of Kylie's pages including  a Bloom girl, once more I went my own direction inspired by hers, and this is what I came up with. 

I started with my sketch using a graphite  Stabilo All pencil and a water brush. 

next I added Neocolor II crayons and blended them with gesso. 

I added stamping, all of the stamped images are from my own stamp designs. I used EDY06, EDY07, EDY11, EDY,12 and EDY13

Kylie used this quote in her page, so of course I had to use my own stamp in my page. The leaves have a little Brusho powder dropped into them. 

All done.. 

I am really pleased with how the book, the covers and this page turned out.. and none of them are remotely like Kylie's lol however they were heavily influenced by her and the lesson this week. It has been nice to play with whimsy for a while, it's relaxing and there is never any pressure to 'get it right'

Darcy x