P.5

I had the most fun doing this page, although I wish it showed up better in the scan. I found this ogre in a British lit textbook that I had bought for $1 in a library used book sale. He needed a crown to be true to the story, so I made him one, coloring it with a gold StarLightz pen and making "jewels" with other gel pen colors. This gold is the best looking I've found in a gel pen...much shinier than any others I've ever used...and I've tried a bunch! I just glued the picture along the left side, so it can be lifted to read the words underneath. The story says that the ogre was sitting under a canopy made of rose-colored spiderwebs which had tiny green flies embedded in it. To depict this, I pulled apart a used drier sheet that I had dyed with very diluted Golden's Fluid Acrylic in quinacridone magenta. I adhered it along the top of the page with a little thick tacky glue and made the flies with dots of glue covered with green micro-glitter.

P.4

The border for this page was cut from decorative computer paper. The swan was an image I scanned and printed from a Dover book, colored with Prismacolor pencils and added a bit of white micro-glitter on the wings.

P.3

This page told of the burial of the main character's father, so I illustrated that by constructing a cross out of woodgrain paper. The flowers were cut from a gardening magazine and the birds are from a rubberstamp. I used a gray .05 Copic MultiLiner pen to write on the cross. I thought black ink would have been too harsh looking.

Fairy Tale AB - p.2

This is the title page of another story in the book, colored just as before.

Altered Book: Andersen Fairy Tales

In my Imagine8 art group we have been working on an altered book round robin for the last couple of years. It has taken a long time for the books to make it to everyone because we only meet 4 times a year. These are a few of the pages that I did in Linda's book. I found it to be more of a challenge than I had expected, because I didn't want to cover up the text of the stories. So using acrylic paint as I most often do, was out. Instead, I used sponges to apply rubberstamping inks and found that gave color to the pages without obscuring the words. On this page, I colored the printed illustration at the top with decorator chalks picked up and applied with a Niji waterbrush filled with blending fluid. Then I stamped the rose and colored it the same way, adding a bit of gold Pearl Ex powder for glitz.