Purple Pages

This past summer i participated in a "tip in" altered book swap with three friends. I introduced my altered book Purple, HERE. As sometimes life gets in the way - it wasn't until this week that i recieved these pages from Shelley, a talented collage artist i am proud to know.

But whoa, they were worth waiting for! Her pages are 7 1/4" by 5 1/4" per the measurements of my book. She altered front and back - so instead of gluing them into my book - i'll create a pocket to slip them into.

(in sad altered book swap news, the pages i sent to her two months ago have still not turned up - i have just about given up on the US post office, and plan to recreate them)

Here are the backs of the images shown above. Shelley does wonderful layered collage - often with glossy magazine images.
We all agreed to do ATC (artist trading card) for sign in tags in this swap. Here is the back of Shelley's tag - i love this so much - i just might enlarge it and frame it on the wall!
Here is the front of the ATC. With a colour theme like this - it is fun to mix and match elements - anything goes - as long as the colour family is the same.
Now to make receiving this swap even more fun - look how Shelley decorated the envelope! How much fun is that?!?!?!
She also threw in this stunning piece of background paper done with stamps and glaze and paint. I know, i'll use this to create the pockets to hold her purple pages in my book!
Here is the front of the envelope. I have seen this sort of thing in Somerset Studio - i wonder what the post office thinks of these crazy collage artists? I may never send a plain manila envelope again!

Thanks Shelley for all this wonderful artwork. And thanks again to Dorothy and Shanna for this fun swap.

Tip in Swap - altered book pages

What is a tip in swap- you might be asking? When you do a normal round robin - you send your books through the mail for each participating artist to work on. With a tip-in - you just create pages that are mailed and then attached to the book by the owner. You can either do one sided pages that are just glued into the book - over existing book pages. Or you can cut away two pages leaving a 1/2 inch border. You then glue the new pages in between the cut sections - thereby {"tipping" them INTO your book. And no risk of books getting lost in the mail! For this project i created my own book "Purple" you can read about here.

The first pages i got to work on for another persons book were a fun trip down to the wild wild west. Shanna's book is called Driftwood, sort of a play on the HBO series Deadwood. You get to pick a character who light have lived in this town and create pages based on that theme. I chose a team of bandits above - selecting images and stories from the web that i embellished and changed to fit the book's theme.

I used a double ledger page torn from the center of a signature as the base. Some of it shows through. after arranging all the images and aging the whole thing i felt it still needed something.

SO i took a water pen - dipped in black ink pad ink and scribbled all over the pages. i like how it turned out. The tie is just there in the middle for the image - the book would never close! i moved it to the edge before mailing it off.

For my second spread i chose to invent a story about a lady named Bella who started a fine victorian establishment in town. It was fun playing with various papers to evoke the ornate salons of the day.

The image on the left opens to reveal her true identity - Madam Bella, of the Bella Union saloon.

I created one big long playbill sort of thing, something i saw in Wendy Addison's shop, the Theatre of Dreams. She uses a vintage letter press to create awesome printings. I have a sample somewhere in my yet to be unpacked stuff. I'll show it to you when i find it.

Here is a picture of it all in one shot:

Here is my sign in tag. I used a sample of wood grain formica. I found out i have about 50 formica samples in all different styles. Still have not found my good scissors but i have wood grain formica coming out the ying yang.