Personal Art Challenges - fun for all!

I am in an online yahoo group that swaps atc's and altered journals. Today the hostess posted two online challenges. Two really fun ideas anyone can try. The first is to create something out of the stuff in your art studio/craft room garbage can!

Lord knows the treasures that lurk in there. I'll keep you posted with what i end up making. Too late now to start digging through my garbage!

The second challenge is to create something from junk mail. I did this years ago in an altered book swap. I was sitting in front of the tv set going through the mail and thought - hey - why not just use what i have here? I have actually done this a few times.
The picture on top was made exclusively from a Target flyer. As you can see it had wonderful graphic images. these were on different pages in the flyer - but i created by own layout by putting them together. I think that is part of what we altered book enthusiastes enjoy doing - sort of pretending we are magazine editors or advertising creative staff - doing our own layouts and photo spreads. We get to decide what goes where on our pages for maximum effect.

This next set of pages were done in an altered dictionary round robin. The idea was to create a spread based on a word in each letter of the alphabet. Can you guess the word? Answer below!

The pages were actually three separate spreads with a peak hole in each to the next - each time revealing a bit more of what was beyond. I sat in front of the TV set and cut up ads and junk mail into little triangles and geometric shapes and then pasted it all together.

This spread was done in a calendar round robin. You would work within the theme of the calender -you know the type - spiral bound, with lots of illustrations. This one had all these sassy gal images travelling and shopping throughout the seasons. I just used a bunch of necklaces cut out of a catalog. rather than cut them out (those beads? i don;t think so!) I scanned them into the computer, and printed them on a transparency. Then glued it on the page - just because the colors and the flowers worked with the image - no other reason. Working in these calendars taught me to just be spontaneous and go for it. Not to spend too much time over thinking the spreads. You can see i added those "buy me, gift idea" stickers they put in Domino magazine - again - just because the colors were perfect.

Oh - the secret word? kaleidoscope!