After I booked my trip to Nebraska for Thanksgiving, I knew I wanted to document the days in a SMASH album. I have been doing this for the past 2 trips utilizing my Instax camera film...and I love the results....plus it gives me a simple canvas to doodle and art on throughout the trip and flights. .Just have to do a few simple prep pages to satisfy my creativity.
So the cover idea came from Balzer Design's blog
post about foil tape art. Instead of using cardboard cut-outs, I opted to use my handwriting and cut out foam stickers.
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| (I adore Jen Osborn's handwriting, so I stole some of her font style letters.) |
Then stuck them in place, and took foil tape over some images...and cheetah print duct tape over others.
One thing I learned is going vertical with the tape makes it easier to shape around the letters and images. The SMASH album already had an imprint on the cover so I just rubbed into the design as well.
Nervously, I painted over the entire book using white gesso and acrylic paint. I wanted a solid base so I wouldn't worry about the paint chipping off the tape.
And then I added my color. It appeared much brighter when it was wet...then dulled quit a bit when dried.
Time to sand...also learned pieces of sand paper work better than the block sander.
Some areas I sanded down too much so it dulled the shiny tape.
So I decided to brighten areas up by highlighting with neon red and pink and adding a real leaf.
After a few days, the leaf turned a dark maroon probably due to the gell I used to adhere it, so simple solution was to doodle on the leaf.
And that is the cover with more to come I am sure. As I complete the album, I tend to go back and add more to the cover, but it is the startt and my favorite part. The other prep work I put into the albums is prepping pages with gesso or absorbent ground mediums so I can use watercolor crayons or markers ,pastels, etc..
