Altered York Minster Book

As well as messing about with old jewellery, I’ve also been putting the finishing touches to my altered York Minster book. I didn’t have any real aim apart from to play with the pages and images and see what happened.

The cover simply had a quatrefoil border in embossing paste added.

Experiments with transfer medium on a colour photocopy with added background in watersoluble oil pastel. I love this image taken pointing up at the sky.

Stones from a scrap of marbled paper and medieval tiles.

Close up of the tiles. The page has been given a rough coat of gesso followed by a rough coat of brown oil pastel. The ’tiles’ are made from a papier mache medium pressed into a silicon mould, painted and dry brushed and then mounted on little squares of card.

 

More tile patterns  and fantasy mason’s marks, made by putting letter stickers together. There are always a few x, v, z, j etc kicking around on the end of a sheet and it was fun to see what patterns I could make from them.

Dragon boss in flames and medieval dioceses. My first attempt at stitching through ready pierced paper.

Part of the rose window with oil pastels behind and layering two transfers of a painted roof boss.

More mason’s marks. real ones this time, scratched into a heavy layer of gesso on one side of the spread and drawn onto a thinner layer with some assorted facts on the facing page.

More experiments with transfer medium and photocopies. The great seal of York Minster (reversed!) on the left. You can also see the slubby thread I used to stitch it back together, the very old original staples having rusted away.

My found poem pages. The rest of the text is obscured by layers of gesso and iridescent watercolours and the words are joined with rub down transfers of gold dotted lines. The pages are interleaved with wrapping acetate from a posh shop!

More experiments with transfer medium, this time onto clear acetate sheet, using patterns from the Five Sisters window which is referenced in the original text. The images on the right are mounted above a paper copy of the pattern using spacers.

A transfer medium green man with oil pastels and embossing paste foliage on the left. On the right, two left-over images from the Five Sisters window have been stuck on the page, the ‘panes’ cut out with a craft knife and painted gauze stuck behind. Painted gesso covered card strips form the masonry around the ‘window’.

The gauze ‘stained glass window’ with the light behind it.

The back of the gauze with embossing paste patterns and the same stencil used as a rubbing for the ‘cope chest’.

The silk brocade contents of the ‘cope chest’.

And the ‘richly embroidered jewelled copes’ page using a pricking tool for the embroidery and Stewart Gill paints and glitter medium for extra sparkle!

A rose and text fragment with stick-on edging.

The final page – the Minster and the Roman fort.

And the back cover – assorted stars, gesso and paint with the pamphlet stitch re-stitched spine.

It’s been fun.

But still in my heart of hearts, I can hear the scandalised whisper of my conscience,

“You drew in a book…”

Read Full Post »

More of my altered book

This has been ticking away slowly and quietly in the madness of early January.

I printed out some colour pictures to transfer – this one is a restored boss with a dragon spouting flame – and found a diagram of English medieval dioceses which I coloured in with water colours.

York Minster was badly damaged by a fire started by lightning several years ago, so I added scraps of textured hand made paper to the bottom of the page and turned them into flames licking the boss.

I also found a great photo taken looking up through the Minster so it framed a section of the sky and transferred that. I’m getting the hang of the transfer process now –  three layers of gel medium will keep the image stable while you’re removing the paper backing. Sky added with water soluble oil pastels

I wanted to create a found poem from random words on a double page, so I circled some that appealed to me and then roughly blocked out the rest of the page with gesso.

I covered the gesso with shimmering watercolours in lilacs and blues borrowed from my middle one. (More of the amazing art bargains we got back in October), added a moon and stars card topper thing that I’d had for ages and divided the pages with a piece of printed acetate which was wrapping around a gift from a very posh shop.

Just a bit of finishing to do here,  making the words link more clearly and thinking about what my subconscious was doing with the words I chose.

Read Full Post »

The first results of ‘ring-fenced creative time’

That hour or so between coming home from work on a Friday evening and having to start on making an evening meal has proved to be the perfect place for some creative time. To be honest, I never really did much useful then, apart from potter on the computer and do odd jobs, so it’s really time reclaimed. Anyway, here are the results of our second session.

I really enjoyed the gel medium transfer process with the Green Man but was a bit disappointed with the size of some of the holes I’d ended up with and wanted to improve my technique. I’d printed out a selection of pictures linked to York Minster and decided to go for another spread using an image of the York See seal.

The large areas of black around the crossed keys of St Peter worked really well but I need to make sure I’ve thoroughly covered the very edges of the image with the gel medium as this is where it started to fragment. I also still need to carefully remove a few scraps of paper from the border.

Then a transfer of an image of part of the roof and a tower over a wash of oil pastel.

This was much more successful – learning very quickly and loving it. Also, the style of the image means that any missing bits are less obvious.

Hmmm. I wonder if it would work on something other than paper?

I’d printed some images of geometric leading patterns from medieval grisalle windows and decided to try transferring them on some clear acetate.  It was a bit tricky rubbing off the paper without disturbing the transfer but the results, while not perfect, were a lot better than I’d expected.

I mounted the four best transfers over a paper copy of the same pattern, using sticky pad spacers on the corners to hold them slightly clear of the page and hopefully give the impression of a window.

 

And the completed spread.

I’ve placed it on a page which mentions the famous Five Sisters window, a wonder of medieval grisaille glass.  I wonder if it would work as well with colour prints…

Read Full Post »