Recycled Mini-Album Pages–Cars

I have now completed the Cars pages. I began by printing out some “Cars” text in various sizes, and at the same time, to fill the page, I printed some material for the Professional Life pages.

Fussy cutting the cars text.

I applied the text to the page using soft matt gel medium. The pieces were rather delicate and I thought they might tear if I used regular medium.

Once they were dry, I made a wash with titanium white acrylic paint and acrylic polymer and roughly painted over the cars text.

I had a rummage in my card strips box and made a selection, for some “go faster” stripes for this page. I was rather pleased to find the offcuts from the recycled Christmas cards that I used for the pages of this album! Seemed fitting somehow. Recycling the recycled.

I thought the page looked a bit dull so I added a small suggestion of colour with white and brown pan pastels, which also had the effect of muting the brush strokes on the page. I fixed it with my Rustoleum spray sealant (great stuff, but it really stinks!!).

Now for the fun part. I had printed and cut out several car badges and stuck these down with regular matt gel medium, and then cut the card strips to form the “go faster” stripes which were laid down with a suggestion of randomness. You can still see the “cars” text echoing the title and forming a subtle background.

I completed the first Cars page with the addition of a border – I was pleased with how this turned out because it looks almost suggestive of car tyres!

The second “Cars” page shows the cars my dad owned during his life (with the exception of the first one, a Riley, which I do not remember, and have no photo). I wanted to keep the look of the page consistent, and also to introduce a somewhat vintage appearance, so I edited the photos in Serif PhotoPlus, creating a duplicate layer which I desaturated, and then erased away the actual car, so that the colour from the bottom layer popped. Unfortunately when I printed them out the colour balance wasn’t quite right and I had a bit of touching up to do. I fixed the photos first, with Rustoleum clear sealant, and then used various distress inks as watercolours to alter the colours somewhat. The MG Magnette (second down on the left) had no colour added because it was dark grey anyway. After this came the first MG sports car – an MGA in red. This car was, in my opinion, the most attractive of all his cars – it had such beautiful lines. The MGB sports cars (top right) had to be printed from a downloaded image because for some reason I have no photos – he had two (if not 3) of these, all in British Racing Green. He loved his sports cars!

A good number of years before he retired he bought his first Porsche. He drove this for many years, well into his retirement. The second Porsche, a Boxter, was the last car he ever owned, which he was still driving aged 89!!

I am quite pleased that the border on this page, which was determined by the page of the same size further back in the book, looks like a chequered flag! Although he wasn’t into motor racing, it seems appropriate with his love of sports cars.

The final step was to add the journaling and final embellishments to tie the page together.

This takes us up to the end of the second signature of the book.