Altered Book Making

I used to get the magazine, "Cloth, Paper, Scissors" and I LOVED the altered books. They just seemed so cool to me. I even collected a few old board books so I could make an altered book but never got around to it. So when I found out that the American Visionary Art Museum was having a workshop, I jumped at the chance to go.

If you are ever in Baltimore,  you have to go to AVAM. All the work they display is created by self taught artists. It is really different than what you find in a regular museum.  This guy greeted me when I was on my way to the workshop.

The workshop was really fun and totally hands on. Everything was included in the cost so all I had to do was show up and have fun!

We learned all different ways to alter a book. Here's some of my pages.

We used clear packaging tape to transfer images from magazines. Now that was a neat trick!

Lots of fun things to play with here!

The book I used was an old Wonderful World of Disney. It was from a educational series and mine was about transportation. I cut out a few images I liked and used them on altered pages. Note the google eye on my shark. I love google eyes.

This was my favorite page. I made a stamp and did the bottom layer and then painted on black swirls by hand. I use those swirls all the time when I quilt. I call them "death spirals" because when I first started doing them I was reading a book about salt water crocs in Australia and they were always talking about the death roll in the book so some how it stuck in my mind and this quilting pattern became death spirals. 

Weird I know!

Then we glued lots of pages together and cut out a hole. By pure luck, the image in mine ended up being this plane. I thought that was pretty neat-o so I left it. And I really liked painting over the book pages. That was a really fun thing to do. Add colors, patterns, etc with paint......I even tried some finger painting.

Thanks for the great afternoon of fun AVAM!!