Winter: an altered book

I finally finished my first altered book. I made it as a tribute to a very beautiful Tori Amos song Winter, which you should listen to while you read this post. I started with a children's board book. These are very easy for beginner altered artists. I picked some of my favorite song lyrics and created a page for each line. I tried to pick lyrics that gave a flavor of the song.


Winter: a tribute to Tori Amos
The snowflakes, flowers, and "winter" text are all embossed stamps. The spine is covered with a metal screen ribbon.


"i get a little warm in my heart"
This is a simple tear collage. I collaged on light card stock.


"when i think of winter"
The background picture of the bird is a picture I took and altered in Photoshop. The blue leaves are from a magazine, which is where most of my collage images come from.


"boys get discovered as winter melts"
Image of boys behind the peeling image and an embossed stamp to try to cover the Cliniqe logo.


"flowers competing for the sun"
The background image is again one I took and then manipulated in Photoshop. I printed it on grey cardstock. The "film" is just cut from a magazine, not actual film.


"skating around the truth of who i am"
The background image is a picture I took of Brian and altered in Photoshop. I printed that on grey cardstock and added the image. This was my first page. I got the inspiration for it while driving home from work, listening to Winter, which I did a lot of while making this project.


"but i know dad the ice is getting thin"
The background image is of long icecicles, which I found on the internet and altered in Photoshop. That was printed on grey cardstock, and then I stapled parchment paper on top to give it a frosty look. It didn't photograph well.


"hair is grey and the fires are burning"
This point of the song gets a little intense, so I wanted the imagery to relfect that. Both of these images came from old National Geographics, which are wonderful for collaging (by the way).


"so many dreams on the shelf"
I painted the page black with acrylic paint and then glued this image onto it. I really feel like I ripped off this neat image. It was and ad for some kind of alcohol, but the image is so pretty. If I were trying to sell this book, it might be a problem.


"he says, when you gonna make up your mind"
Nothing special here. Just paper glued together.


"when you gonna love you as much as i do"
Again, very simple. Paper and glue.


"'cause things are gonna change so fast"
I made this when I was drunk as a skunk. The line connecting the butterfly stages are star sequins, which are constantly falling out. I sort of like the change metaphor (I'm not very good with metaphors).


"all the white horses have gone ahead"
Not my height of creativity, but at some point I just wanted to finish the dang thing. The glue wrinkling was unfortunate. I'm not sure what was going on here, but the glue stick worked much better than the white glue. Ah well.


"i tell you that i'll always want you near"
These two pages are shamelessly stolen from diamond jewelry ads. I used silver sharpy to trace over the white lines (which is hard to tell from the pictures). Then obviously I covered the jewelry with the earth picture. These pages were also tragically wrinkled.


"you say that things change"
So sad.


"my dear"
The last words of the song are "my dear," so it seemed appropriate to stamp that on the back, which is hard to see from the picture. The snowflake stamp is embossed. The paper is just crinkled and glued on.

So this was pretty fun. I don't feel like I've found my craft niche, but I have more projects up my sleeve. :)

Thanks for reading!!