proverbial: adjective

well-known: widely known and recognized, and often viewed as stereotypical

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Elizabeth's Altered Book class

Well, I got a little behind so I combined a few Elements of Design from Lesson 7 into the first lay out for Lesson 8. In Lesson 7, I was to show line, form, shape, space and texture. 

Lesson 7

Form and shape to show 3 dimension: I did this several ways, by letting her hair overlap the scroll, and by having her hands disappear under the scroll and over the clam shell. This gives an otherwise flat form, dimension.

space, to show distance or area between, around, above, below, or within shapes and forms: I did this by placing the mermaid up front sitting on the clam shell and the flying pelican is smaller and in the distance. To quote Elizabeth "As a rule of thumb, larger objects tend to appear closer to the viewer and smaller ones tend to recede into the background. Also objects placed lower on the page appear closer in distance than those which are placed higher up."

Texture to give your surface quality which can be either tactile or visual: I actually have a lot of textures going on here, the texture of the sky, since it is pieces of magazine paper glued on and then white washed with a pale blue. There is texture on her tail fin from stickles, and added texture in her hair with Pearls as lines...( also shows movement, like her hair is blowing in the  ocean breeze ), and texture in the ocean.

Lesson 8

To create a background with one of the color groupings: I chose an analogous color selection starting at yellow and ending with blue. That meant I had yellow, green and blues to play with. The only things that don't fall within this are the pelican and the clam shell.

I combined the lines portion from Lesson 7 with Lesson 8's sgraffito technique. I painted green paint over the gesso, then my layer of blue paint and used my embossing tool to scratch the lines to represent the ocean's water flow. ( again, implies movement ) I really enjoyed this, felt like I was back in kindergarten where we use to do this with crayon!

Design a color wheel using paint chips, junk mail, or magazine images

Yikes, really? A color wheel with a mermaid themed book? Now this was a stumper...thank you BJ for helping me to think outside the box! But don't blame her if you think I went too far outside the box!

Now, my color wheel, really is outside the proverbial box, and I hope you will be able to follow the pattern, ready?

here we go:

bubbles represent the color wheel, beginning with violet red, and ending with red. They are in order but to get them all together on the 2 pages, your eye has to travel up and down, so next would be the violet bubbles....

then

each fish assigned to the bubbles shows the complimentary colors. So the violet red bubbles have a yellow green fish, the violet bubbles have a yellow fish, and so on...

and finally

the 3 fish along the bottom of the page that are facing opposite to all the other fish are the primary colors, yellow fish, red fish, green fish

It goes without saying that Dr. Seuss's book was running through my head so I incorporated it into my page, lol Just couldn't help myself! I love the google eyes on the fishies combined with the words to this book, they all seem to be looking around, kinda goofy!

and speaking of goofy...!

 I made a mistake and thank you BJ for pointing it out for me, as soon as I read what she wrote, I was like "duh me"!! I had gotten so excited thinking I had all primary colors lined up on the bottom row but I didn't, I had a secondary color in there, so a quick run back to the crafting room to remove 2 little fishes and invert them ( I am not going to redo the entire pages to make all 3 primary colors fit on the bottom of the pages like I originally planned )......course now, there are 2 little fishes farting bubbles.....lmao..I think I love it! Thanks BJ!

the 3 fish that are facing opposite to all the other fish are the primary colors,

 yellow fish, red fish and blue fish

This was my chart in the making, I have to say that so far, this assignment really made me think.

My brain hurts now.....

what I learned from using magazines

• When you paint over pieces of magazines, I learned to keep in the mind that paint will follow the waft of the magazine paper, so unintentionally I have lines going vertically and horizontally in my sky, but it's OK, I actually like it this way! 
• I also learned that not all magazines are a like, some have very thin paper and they are hard to cut, while other magazine pages have more substance. It's easier to get a crisp punch from the pages that are thicker, ( on my color wheel lay out, I had to double the pages to punch out the circles! )
• I also learned that if you find one color of red in the magazine, then it will be used again. I guess it's easier for them while printing to use one dye: whereas there would be many more shades of blue and green in one issue. I discovered this with several magazines, and became obsessed with looking at their color choices. The one primary color that was the hardest to locate was yellow which kinda surprised me. makes me wonder if yellow cost more to produce or they don't consider it a good color visually? 
• I also was very surprised to find images for my particular theme, the pelican and the clam shell were definitely a bonus discovery!

I am not doing the other color lay out, I have completed a monochromatic one with :Mermaid Humor:, but I want to save my pages to make sure I can do all the remaining classes. If I have space at the end I figure I can always go back and add.

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