Thursday, March 18, 2010

Taking Flight

I finally got up the guts to buy Kelly Rae Robert's book 'Taking Flight'.  It was set to be my last art book... if it didn't get me going, I was going to give away all my art stuff (that I've never used) and quit kidding myself.  I don't understand why I have this 'art' voice screaming in my head anyway, I am seriously NOT artistic...although I am creative.. I like to play..
So back to the book.  I got the book and started reading it.  The rule was that if there were project instructions, I had to do the project before moving on. (sigh)  The first project is to make collage on hard book covers. So I ran out and got some stuff and started the project. 

The first part was to make 'letters' on cloth... the instructions said 1" x 4" which is pretty small - I don't think Kelly is using a 1" wide strip in the demonstration photos... anyway, I followed the directions and here are my letters. (whoops, the t is upside down)  I think they just look sloppy... there were no instructions for what to do with the back of the letters (which are plain white interfacing) so I painted them.

I know this is not going to be a great-looking project, I know I'm going to have to make a lot of ugly stuff before I figure out how to make better stuff, but making ugly stuff is not nearly as much fun as making cool stuff.  It's embarassing!

So, after cutting the covers off the a hardcover book, I was instruceted to collage papers onto the covers to make a base.  I also put just a little material on the covers, since I have quite a lot of fabric. Here are my 'base' covers.


The book covers were about 9" square. These are big pieces of paper, which made them hard to glue flat... I would probably use smaller pieces next time, but I was kind of looking at Kelly's project and she seemed to use at least one big piece as a background, but they get covered with paint and who knows what else anyway, so who knows what they will look like after the next step. 

So, I feel like I have made progress.  I've been lurking on other sites, and trying to figure out process, but have only tried a couple of 'paper paintings', nothing that actually involved painting over a collaged background.  So here goes.  Thanks Kelly Rae.  Check out her site and see her great stuff!

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