Recycled Mini-Album Pages–Astronomy

The second of two posts for today.

Another of my dad’s keen interests was astronomy. He owned a small telescope on a tripod and many times when I was still living at home, he would wake me to go out into the garden in the freezing cold to do some star gazing. Despite the discomfort I always enjoyed this and he showed me some interesting things. When we came in we generally made a nice warming cup of cocoa before returning to bed.

For this page I have chosen one of a series of photos he took of the transit of Venus in 2004.

First of all, the backgrounds. The image on the left-hand side is of an orrery that I found on the Internet. The right-hand background was created with acrylic paints.

First of all I painted the whole surface with a very dark blue (a mixture of Windsor blue and black) and when this was dry, I added the swirling nebula using alizarin crimson, more Windsor blue and a touch of phthalo green, all lightened with a little titanium white.

The tiny stars were created by spattering with metallic silver acrylic paint, which was also used to paint the larger stars.

Onto this background I pasted the images, using regular matt gel medium. The text was scanned from a label written by Dad, which I found in the envelope containing his transit of Venus photos. The photo at the top shows his telescope set up to observe this rare phenomenon.

For the border, I painted around the edges with black acrylic paint, and then, using my white marker pen, I drew the dots and stars, and added the text on the left-hand page. I added an arrow with a black waterproof pen, to indicate the shadow of Venus – it wasn’t really showing up sufficiently! To complete the page, I added some glass bead gel medium to the edges of the photos.

I photographed this page using a scratch paper I have created using black and blue acrylic paint, and a little silver from this page. Here is a photo of it – I am not sure if I will add anything else to it.

The other scratch paper that I’ve made, from recent pages in the mini-album, I made by arranging the colour in stripes. Most of this was from cleaning brushes, but I have also cleaned off my palette knife (particularly the black and white marks). Originally this was going to be a mostly orange scratch paper but I quite like the addition of all the other colours!

Now for some detail shots of the astronomy page. The glass bead gel medium is still not quite dry, and shows white, but this dries crystal clear.

This page completes the penultimate signature of the book.