Recycled Mini-Album Pages–Education

Today I finally managed to get back to my recycled mini-album and do a bit more work on it. I am keen to finish it as soon as possible because I’ve got a lot of other projects I want to work on (especially my teabag art) and made a resolution that I would not start anything else major until I’d finished this album.

This double-page spread deals with the education of the subject of this album. I drew the two border text pieces on scrap paper, adding various quotations on the subject of education. I cut the left one out and cut out its centre, and stuck it down onto the page with soft matt gel medium, leaving sufficient space around the edges to add the black and white border which is a feature of this album. When it was dry, I coloured it with Gathered Twigs distress ink used as a watercolour (smooshing the pad on my non-stick craft sheet and picking it up with a wet brush), adding some variations in colour to create an echo of the black and white border which I planned on painting later. I drew the scroll on a piece of scrap paper, outlining it with a waterproof sepia Faber Castell Pitt pen and added the text in waterproof black. After this I shaded the scroll in the same way, again using Gathered Twigs distress ink. I added a little more colour in the centre with an Inkylicious Ink Duster and Mustard Seed distress ink. I cut the piece out and stuck it down so that it overlapped the text border slightly, again using soft matt gel medium. I added some dots onto the black background with a white marker.

Here is a detail of this page.

For the other page, I did not cut the centre out of the text border, but stuck it down in its entirety, again using soft matt gel medium. I outlined the inner border with the sepia pen and added some doodles and dots. The centre was coloured with Mustard Seed distress ink, using an Ink Duster as before.

To make the mortar board, I drew it on a piece of scrap card and cut it out, and then painted it with black acrylic paint. I cut another piece of card to match the flat top of the mortar board and cut this out, and painted it with black acrylic paint, and then pierced a hole in the centre. I made a tassel from black crochet cotton and pulled the threads securing the top through the hole and stuck them onto the back of the piece of card with a piece of masking tape. I painted the back of this piece black as well, and adhered it onto the main piece, lining it up exactly, using foam pads to create some dimension and to allow room for the attachment of the tassel behind. Before sticking it down, I painted the edges of the foam pads with black acrylic just in case they showed.

Here is a detail picture of this page.

The final step was to paint the black and white border around the whole double page spread, using titanium white acrylic paint. When it was dry, I tidied up the detail with my white marker pen and a waterproof black pen.

On these pictures you can see how the borders show on all the pages as they decrease in size towards the middle of the signature.