Book of Dreams {Preparing your book}

I know many of you have found your book and are anxious to get started..and some already have! I just wanted to pass on some tips on preparing a book to be altered. Some of you are taking all of the insides out of your book and just using the cover and back of the original. I plan to use this book, that my daughter is checking out, and follow Lisa's technique (below) to reduce the number of pages so that it doesn't get too thick!

Preparing a book to be altered by Lisa Vollrath- check this out!
Now you may want to remove pages before starting your project, or you may choose to remove them as you go.

Another part of the preparation is gluing your pages together for sturdiness. Generally speaking, most books don't have pages that are thick enough to withstand a whole lot of abuse. There are a few ways to resolve this:
1. With a glue stick that is archival and easy to use. If you do it this way, work quickly and cover pages all the way to the edge. OR
2. With brush-on glue. Some use YES! paste (which has a very quick drying time), or gel medium, Golden is my personal favorite. If you put it on thinly (use a credit card), it doesn't warp the pages much at all.
Paint on your glue and close the book. When you open it back up (right away), you'll probably have to smooth it out a bit with the edge of a bone folder (bookbinding tool), or the side of a ruler -- that gets out most of your air bubbles and imperfections.
You can glue every few pages together, or leave big gaps of unglued pages between "spreads", or pages on which to put your artwork.

The next step is preparing the pages themselves. There are tons of things you can do to prepare your pages for your art work. Some people leave them entirely as is, and use the words as a background in itself, or highlight certain words, so that the artwork and the original book form are fused together in a way. The techniques I share will have many different methods of preparing your pages. If at this point you want to prepare a few in advance, just to have them set up, you could paint a page with gesso and let dry. This will cover up the words and make the page a bit more sturdy. This is completely optional. I normally don't do it, but know that some prefer to.

If you plan to alter a "board book", one of those books with very thick pages that baby's love to page through, here is a tutorial on preparing one.

Sorry I'm being lazy with giving tutorials for prepping your book, rather than doing my own pictures and instructions. I figured since there is such great information and pictures already out there, why reinvent the wheel? For our project techniques that I will post each Wednesday I will be showing (and telling) you about each technique using my own book as the example.