After you’ve chosen the book (or books!) you want to alter and you’ve prepped the book and practiced with backgrounds, it’s time to put some thought into themes and topics for your pages.
First of all, your altered book does not have to have a common theme running through all of the pages. You don’t even have to come up with any specific theme for a single page when you start out! Sometimes that will just come to you as you progress. In this article, we’re using text that’s already printed on the pages of your book to inspire your creative juices.
The first project is a very basic example of masking text on a page spread. In this spread, I followed the theme of my book, which is a gift for a friend I’ve known 20 years this fall. The entire book will chronicle our friendship, so on this page, I masked words that convey friendship and the closeness she and I have shared over the years. You’ll see in the close-up that the masks are not perfect. Neither am I!
Unlike the first project, where the words don’t make sense if you string them together outside the context of the entire book, the masked words in “Gettin’ It Done” come together to form two phrases. This is a fun technique where you can make up a new story within the story of your chosen book, or simply make a statement with one sentence worth of masked words.
In looking at the photo of this project, I’d like to point out one of my mistakes. See over on the left-hand side of the spread, there’s paint on the edges of the pages? I left that on purpose to show you that even seasoned altered book artists make mistakes. I got all caught up in the moment and forgot to put a sheet of waxed paper behind the pages I was painting. The difference is that 7 years ago, I would have gotten very uptight about this and would have thought the book ruined, but No! This is now an opportunity for me to think about how I’ll decorate the page edges before this book is complete.
There are a variety of masking products on the market, in the form of pens, fluids, tapes, and, I’m sure, other things. All of the projects in this article utilize a very basic tool you already have in the house: The Sticky Note. Since I’m not picky about the shape of the masks when doing these altered book techniques, trimming the sticky part of these notes worked wonderfully. I do find it handy to have a pair of tweezers nearby when pulling up the mask, however, so I don’t get fingerprints on my freshly painted pages.
In “Prevail,” I chose a phrase from the text on the page to incorporate into my design. Here we’re back in the friendship book, so the phrase matches both the book theme and the page theme I wanted to do. This book is an old Daily Guideposts book, given to me yearly by my aunt. She alters the book in her own way before giving it to me every year by handwriting in quotes, birthday reminders and little love notes, so I incorporated one of those into the spread as well.
As you can tell by now, a lot of my work is very personal and has meaning to me and, hopefully, to the recipient of the work. The final project is in a book entitled “The Body Has a Head,” a funky anatomy book that’s written in very flowery language and with no pictures at all. I’m doing this book as a study in body image and to chronicle the oddities my body has gone through since I turned 30. This spread was done on pages talking about the eyes; one of my most-complimented features. I was diagnosed with glaucoma earlier this year and as I did this spread, I thought about what things would be like if I don’t follow the regimen my eye doctor prescribed!
The collage on the right-hand page is a digital collage using cropped photos of me from all stages of my life. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be a traditional collage instead. Images from magazines would be great for this kind of project as well.
And one more thing: When you’re creating, think about the backs of your spreads. If you’re reinforcing your pages with items other than glues (such as eyelets, brads, wire, staples, sewing them together, tape), you might want to consider how to finish off the page backs. I like to glue one more page to the back to cover up the back of the eyelets or brads, etc. Before starting the projects in this article, I reinforced all of the pages by gluing at least 2-3 pages to the back of each of the pages I worked on, in order to give them more strength. Once I finished the back of the last page spread to cover the backs of the eyelets, I basically had pages that were 4 pages thick. This gives you something to keep in mind as far as cutting out pages so that your book will close when you’re done altering it ... if that’s what you want it to do!
