The Manly Book of Men

So here's what I've been working on this month. Lisa gave the Ten Two Studios design team the challenge of using one of her paper bag books with a themed collection of collage materials. I used the brown piano-hinge book, which is deceptively simple in appearance but has a surprising number of surfaces to decorate! The open ends of the paper bags come with six cardstock inserts (approx. 5" square) and there are also six tags. I cut slits in the bottoms flaps of the paper bags to make pockets for the tags.

My theme was Men, which for me is a challenge because I tend to use mostly female images in my art work, so I went a bit over the top with The Manly Book of Men, full of masculine words! I let my husband chose the initial paint colors, and I applied acrylic paint directly to the paper bags without any gesso. Things got a bit messy but the brown paper was surprisingly sturdy, and although it did get a wee bit wrinkly, it took on a more leathery texture with the layers of paint and application of gel medium for the collage.

I also had to find manly looking designs in my scrapbook paper stash, which generally favors flowers and pretty colors. I found some browns and blues and geometric shapes. The hardest part was coming up with a list of Manly Words (that wouldn't destroy my "safe" rating on Flickr ;o). You can tell I read and watch too many things set in 19th & early 20th-century Britain.

And this is probably the first time I've done book pages on golf, fishing or baseball!



You can see the whole book in my Manly Flickr set.

Crafting 365, numerous days!