Visage book

A couple of days ago I signed up to do a class at the 2013 Textile and Art Academy event in Brisbane. I've long admired the superb felting of textile artist Catherine O'Leary so when I saw she was offering a long and indulgent 5 days of tuition I succumbed to the temptation and signed up. She taught at the same event in 2011 but it coincided with when I recovering from surgery so I couldn't go. At that time the convener of the event, Lena Tisdall, had also been calling for volunteers to join an altered book project which she called Project 22. I joined up along with 21 others. We were allowed a very generous 20 months to create the books which Lena plans to display at the next event coming up at the end of June this year.

Yesterday I got out the book Lena had sent to each of the players. Fortunately she had given very open guidelines that we could choose whatever appealed as a theme for the book. The book for altering was called "Pictorial History of the Brisbane River" and had some lovely black and white photos from over a hundred year period but a book based on that theme had no interest to me....so I dismantled the book by cutting off the spine and glueing groups of 3 pages together to give a nice firm surface to work on. The book is quite small, the pages are 17.5 x 24.5cm

The cover of my altered book - VISAGE

I choose the theme "Visage" for the book ("Facebook" being already taken!)

Today I made a cover and 2 pages for the book. I used an image of the same face cropped to various different sizes and printed them in grayscale through the inkjet printer then over painted them with colour, stencilled, stitched and appliqued in various ways. My plan is to do 12 -20 images of faces in this way.