“Creating fabulous backgrounds for your altered books or mixed media applications with lots of depth and texture. An adventure in color for altered books.” This class was created out of the need to use all the supplies and paper we’ve bought and never used. We’ll be taught how to maximize art supplies and your art making skills to create more with less.
Over the 3 days I attended all 3 of Bernie Berlin’s classe where we learnt a series of techniques, which I incorporated into an altered book. The overall theme was to create various backgrounds for altered books or mixed media or altered art, concentrating on creating depth and texture.
One of our classes titled ‘Layers’ started us of with creating just that … texture, texture, texture, utiliting old papers and supplies that you’ve never used or would usually throw away; such as old newspapers, magazines, patterned scrapbook paper etc.
The 'animal' piece below turned into my front cover and whilst you can’t see any of the underlying layers, there are torn bits of magazine print with several layers of acrylic paint, texture paste, animal images, acrylic glaze, embossing powder – all of the above creating texture and depth. This one is still a work in progress.
The 'eye' piece below, another ‘Layers’ piece. Here I pasted several pages together to make it stronger and tore an opening in the middle, pasted the eye image behind and adhered those pages together. Then came the layering. Thorougly enjoyable this process. Which initially I must add looks absolutely disgusting and disorganised and all wrong, but I kept thinking it’s all gonna be covered and purely there to create underlying texture, which thankfully in the end did. Not too shabby I might add …
This one below didn’t quite turn out as initially planned, but I’m still happy with my dark and broody piece. The purpose again was to create layers as the pieces above and finish it off by covering the entire image with guaze, my initialy intention was to cover my front cover with the gauze, but in the end I just felt it would be an injustice to conceal my animals, so instead used the gauze on this page.
Another technique called ‘Profound Secrets of the Burnt & Bound’ was a series of many, many, many layers of paper, stamping, paint, ink, glaze, alcohol inks, etc. Without giving away Bernie’s secrets and going into too much detail, again the background on my two focal images on my orange page was created with a series of building up layers with various mediums, paper and stamps . Once done, rope attached, coloured and the image adhered over the rope sitting about 1.5 cm above the background paper, this is an incredible sample of amazing dimension. I’ve never used so much gel medium in one go.
Close ups of the 2 dimension pieces adhered to the double page above.
Some additional pieces created over the weekend. The bird image insert, I can't take credit for. This is the wonderful artwork created by DJ Pettitt, which I purchased at the retreat. And this was the inspiration for my orange tones.