I bought a bunch of new art supplies a year ago because I wanted to try and push myself into starting this project once and for all… and the supplies sat in a plastic bin on one of the Billy bookshelves right behind me all year long. Every now and then a kid would reach for the bin and I would use the Denise voice to get her to back off of my stuff.
When I opened the bin yesterday, I was surprised to see that I had not bought any watercolors. I had watercolor pencils (which are fabulous, of course) but no tube or cake watercolors. Disappointing. I poked around in Elly’s room to see if I could find a couple of tubes to borrow for a couple of days – no luck.
So, I started with what I have right now. Watercolor pencils and acrylics first. (Chalk and oils next, maybe.)
It’s been a very long time since I played with any craft supplies so all I did was splash and spread and get the feel of the paper with the brushes (and my fingers) and the products.
I did glue a couple of pages together to see if that’s going to be necessary more often than not. I used some weird scrapbooking glue stick – so far, it looks like the adhesive is going to hold up but we’ll see since I did use watercolor pencils on those pages and when you use watercolors… you use… water. (I know that shocks some of you.)
Notice the you can still see the original text underneath the watercolor pencil pages. That’s ok. The page isn’t done and I’ll want some text to be just barely visible so the message I’m hiding is obviously being hidden. That’s really part of the point of this particular altered book project – to get a glimpse of the “original message”. On some pages I’ll be manipulating the original message to tell the story I want to tell… but I’m getting ahead of myself, way ahead of myself.
At least I’ve started and it didn’t hurt a bit.
It’s looking good!