As promised, below are collages from my second altered book. You won’t be surprised to hear that at the moment, I have three others in progress. I won’t be torturing you with those any time soon (maybe on Instagram).

The theme of altered Book #2 is dance.

I love dance—ballet, modern dance, children dancing. I once saw a performance by the Mark Morris Dance group that felt life changing; the entire audience was overwhelmed with awe.

I also loved watching the enthusiam of children in dance competitions all the years my niece danced.

I wiggle to David Byrne’s music in the morning, the closet I get to dancing these days. I never learned formal dance.

I imposed some silly rules for myself in this book. Each collage had to have at least one:

Dancer
Butterfly
Non-human primate
Bird

A hymn and a bible passage. Why? Because dance is a celebration of sentient existence in the universe! I grew up in a Baptist church that forbade dancing but I found this Psalm and it spoke to my heart.

I think that is a Baptist monkey, quite upset that I put the dancing beauty in a church. Or maybe he’s singing her a song?

Things went wrong on the right side of the page. I had to get creative to cover it up. Serendipity! I found that quote—could it be more perfect? (I mean the quote for a dancer in church, not the collage itself.)

Now things get super-duper silly. I found the picture of the dancers and the couple from the detective movie and knew that had to be joined.

I should have replaced the talk and thought bubbles on the left so that they are more legible, but I let it go. Viewers just have to squint!

I joined the two chimps to fit the twist-theme. Those are Beatrix Potter ducks. I loved mixing a modern song with ancient dancers.

What a hot mess! This page is a lesson in learning from mistakes. It did not turned out as planned.

First I put down a white background and stamped over it. Then I pasted on three pictures of my niece, Savannah, dancing. Then I went over it with a light coat of gesso. My intent was to slightly fade Savannah into the background to symbolize that was in the past. But the stamps I used were water soluble, not permanent as I thought. They mixed with the gesso and Savannah ended up way more faded than planned.

I tried stamping on musical notes but that made a mess. So I printed some music on thin paper . You can see it on the left side but you may not be able to tell that it wrinkled and torn.

The middle picture of my grand-niece Kenz is too small compared to the other two. Her feet weren’t in the picture so I covered that up with her cat. Leaf stamps and an extra butterfly were added to cover up other mistakes. Then I realized I forgot the bird! So I threw in two bird stamps on the right and called it done.

A fun hot mess.

This collage has a lot in common with the pandemic one in last week’s post. I spent a ridiculous amount of time finding articles about the evils of rock and roll dancing. A lot of time but a lot of fun. (In case it is not clear from my David Byrne comment above, I do not believe rock and roll to be evil.)

I needed a fairly calm spread after that last collage. When I was trying to decide which bird to use, one accidently landed on Ben Franklin’s head. Perfect! Both birds had to stay.

This is another personal collage. The dancers are my grandnephew and his lovely bride. They honeymooned in Scotland. This castle is one of the pictures they took.

I wanted to include their pups but I couldn’t find a good picture of them together. So I found two and sized them up to cut together.

I was so pleased with my retouching—there were tourists on the sidewalk. I painted them out and you can’t tell they were ever there.

Why a beaver? I just loved how he gazed up at the happy couple.

Another elegant couple! As I sorted through my piles of snips, I knew the swans had to go with Fred and Ginger, as did the “fancy” primate. When I came across the bugler, she said she needed to be there. Fred and Ginger were dancing while Hitler was rising to power. The bugler warns that world is on the brink of war and the atomic age.

Super silliness. A diving penguin for the bird. Can you spot the non-human primate? I cut the scuba-diver’s face out, put in a chimp’s, then pasted on the chimps arms.

I learned a very important altered book lesson. Don’t put a focal point on the fold of the book. The second dancer from the left, her face won’t stay glued down, even with the help of a washi tape butterfly. Another hot mess!

A mistake here was choosing an impossible-to-read font for the quote but I felt very happy with how the different background pages merged together somewhat seamlessly.

Last but not least, I debated over including Fred and Ginger twice but I couldn’t rid myself of the idea of juxtaposing them with an older couple. I searched long and hard for that Canadian couple on the left. That’s all I remember about them, dancing at a Senior Center. If you’re wondering, that animal in the lower left is a real primate, though I’ve forgotten its name. Looks like it belongs in a Lord of the Rings movie.

Now you know how completely silly I can be! Who cares if the birds and butterflies are out of proportion to size of the people or that Ben Franklin has a bird on his head. Collage-world follows its own logic.

I hope you find something fun to spark your creative juices.

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Books, Paper, Paint, and Glue