Obscured Book Page Technique

aka - the masking tape thing

Perhaps you want to have some text as a background on your project (collage, card, scrapbook page, tag, etc) and the easiest way is to adhere a page torn from a book. Or perhaps you're actually working in an altered book. But you don't really want someone READING the book page - it's supposed to be the background. I mean, how many times have you put down a page from a book and then found something on it that was totally distracting? Or, worse yet, naughty?

This technique is great for obscuring the text - it still looks like a book page but it's not as legible. Kinda like you sanded it a lot but not as messy. Not sure who came up with this, but I learned it in a class taught by Beverly Seymour (B-Line Designs) several years ago and then forgot about it until I saw it on Tim Holz' 12 Days of Christmas 2009.

So I'm going to try to do my first HOW-TO here - since there are so many photos, I've made them smaller - but you can click on them to see them larger if you like. Here goes:

Supplies needed:

• adhesive (decoupage medium, soft gel medium, even watered down white glue)
• applicator (brush, sponge brush, your fingers)
• substrate (art journal, scrapbook page, card, canvas, canvas board, something you messed up before, wood, metal, whatever you prefer - you could even do this in an altered book)
• pages of text (from dictionaries, foreign books, engineering books, even phone books - I understand it works best with papers that don't have a shiny finish but I have no proof of that)
• old fashioned masking tape

Steps:

1. slap a little adhesive on your substrate
2. place your page on top of the adhesive (see, told you this was easy)
   
3. burnish in place - anything not adhered well will may up completely
4. let dry (hum-de-dum-de-dum - that's me watching paint/glue dry - hehe)
5. cover all or part of the page with masking tape ** if you want to make sure something shows when you're done, don't put masking tape on it **
   
   DISCOVERY: after I started covering these three pieces for the photos, I realized I needed wider masking tape but, alas & woe, didn't have any, so later I tried packing tape and it worked almost as well as the masking tape (and it's pretty cool looking so I saved it to possibly use later in another piece)
6. peel back the masking tape, starting inside the piece and peeling toward the outside
   
   Now you have a beautiful, obscured text background that is HIGHLY ABSORBANT. It's perfect for receiving color now but if you want to protect it, just coat it with your adhesive.
   

Art with Obscured Text Backgrounds:

close up of KEY TO MY HEART.............close up of PEACE.............tag made at Ephemerites

So that's it for my first HOW-TO. What do you think? Would you like to see more?
Thanks for stopping by ~ Sherry

linked to the Something Old Challenge at Mixed Media Monday and
the torn paper challenge at Theme Thursday