express yourself

I just tried something new and exciting that I thought I'd share. I received a catalogue in the mail the other day at work from a university wanting me to come get a business degree. While I am not interested in pursuing a Master’s Degree in business right now (or perhaps ever), I couldn't bring myself to throw the book away. It was a thick sort of magazine with good quality pages much thicker than the normal magazine - kind of like a Somerset Studio magazine, but a little thicker feeling. So anyway, I decided to experiment.

First I glued every other page together so they’d be twice as thick, by smearing on some gel medium around the edges in a rather haphazard and messy manner, then flipping over the next page onto the glued page and scraping a credit card along the top to smooth them out. Then I scrubbed on some gesso to mostly white out the words and, when dry, pressed the book down under some heavy books to even it out.

I have since worked in several pages of the book with really good results - so far the pages have taken acrylic, lumiere, chalk pastel, black gesso, tissue, candy wrappers, aluminum tape, and pens of all kinds with no problems. I think this will end up being a really nice art journal for me, and all it cost was one hour's worth of gessoing and gluing!

So, if you're cheap like me, you might want to give this a try – it is quite exhilarating to work in such a loose and messy way, and I find myself pretty relaxed when I work in it because it was just trash anyway (like I'm not nervous that I'm "messing up" something I paid precious dollars for). My coworkers are amused at my form of recycling my junk mail - I wonder what the school would think of what I've done to their catalogue?? :)

I'll post some of the pages as soon as I have a few done and "postable."