It’s been a long time of watching Netflix, feeling lazy, uninspired and just plain uncreative. But then I had the idea of using the old tattered greek books a friend of mine gave me to make art. I’ve always loved using newsprint or book pages in my art.

She gave me a bag of old books, some of which were beyond donating. The decent ones went to a little bus stop free library here on Paros. The ones beyond repair were kept for my art.

Using PVA glue mixed with water, I first began by sticking some pages onto pages in one of my sketch books.

At first, I worked with pastels and above is the first one I did. Everyone loves donkeys.

Second was another donkey, ’cause I thought I’ll do a series of donkeys.

Of course, I got bored doing donkeys (’cause I’m like a 5 yr old) and decided to try something more vintage looking. For these next ones I used a different book (loose pages from what was once a book really, in much worse condition). They’ve gone a much darker brownish yellow.

I love old alarm clocks. I only have one tiny silvery rusted one here now, but I used to have a small collection of them in Australia. This is pastel also.

I love my coffee stains. Sometimes stains are accidental, I tend to leave my work on the kitchen table (my work surface) so accidents happen, but other times I rest my coffee cup on the paper on purpose just for the look it creates.

The coffee pot is pastel, watercolour and a bit of acrylic. Not my favourite.

Lastly, I thought a sprig of lavender might be nice. I did this in watercolour. Turns out that works pretty well on the stuck pages too.

I’ve been preparing more pages to work on but I’ve used proper decoupage glue for the next lot – not modpodge which I know is great because I’ve run out of that, so I bought another brand a couple of days ago. Not good. It barely sticks and the result if a much more buckled paper.

I did iron the pages (from the back) after they dried to make sure they were as flat as I could get them, but even ironing the ones I used the decoupage glue on wasn’t good enough for my liking which means I can’t really use pastel on those. I’ll have to use paint on those.

I’ll go back to using PVA.

The problem with PVA is that pastels won’t stick properly to the bits of glue off the book page. eh. I can work with that. Pages that don’t stick properly just isn’t working for me.

Next I’m working on some commissions and a couple more rocks just for fun.

z