Altered Books

A new "craft". Just what I need right? As if I don't have enough to do. Any friends, family or frequent visitors to this blog know that I love just about any and all crafts and/or artwork.

My newest form of art has come to me in the form of altering books. I'm altering a Twilight book to be specific. This is what inspired me: Eclectic Souls Shabby Heart @ 1000 Markets.

So, what is an altered book? It's simply an art form in which existing books are reworked into works of art, often manifested in a variety of ways. Words or images from the book are usually retained as a part of the altering. Sometimes the books become an entirely new idea, not remotely retaining any of the words or images from its original status.

Here's some websites with galleries of altered books:
Altered Book Lessons
Altered Book.com
Modern Gypsy: Altered Page How To

Of course I'm not doing this alone - I have some other Twilight Moms with me and we're actually doing a Round Robin.

So, what's a round robin? We pass our books to different individuals in the group, each alters a section of their choice. They are inspired by the text or choose a theme and transform a spread (2 pages of the book together) into their own style of art! At the end of the round robin we all receive our books back, completed unless we want to add more ourselves. We also then alter the front of our book ourselves. In our case, we have 13 in our group so we'll be passing books every 2 weeks until about the end of July. I'm very excited to see what my book looks like when it's returned to me.

My plan is to once a month post the spreads that I have completed during this Traveling Twilight Saga Round Robin. It does take a while to work on these spreads. This is not a sit down, do it, it's done kind of project. I'm working with media I've not worked with since probably my high school art class. I'm a scrapbooker but this really makes me think outside the box as I can use so many things I wouldn't dare use in my scrapbooks (acrylic paints, watercolors, fibers, glue, chalks, charcoal, pencils, etc...) I know some scrappers do but I'm a very simple, clean and quick scrapper. This is definitely outside of my comfort zone! That's one reason I'm doing this.

So here is my first spread in my first altered book.





This is my sign in page - it's the inside front cover. All the participants in the round robin will sign in when they work in my book.




Some people even alter books into purses as done here at One of a Kind Altered Book Purses....I don't think I'll be doing that anytime soon! Extremely fascinating - be sure to take a peak at these purses! Amazing the talent some people have.