Silhouette art with old book pages

A friend recently wallpapered her study with old book pages, it looks fantastic. At one time, I would have considered tearing pages out of a book to be a terrible crime but now I think it's a great way of repurposing old books which are falling apart.

I decided to make an art work combining old book pages (from an ancient copy of Pride and Prejudice which I bought for R10) with the silhouette of one of my favourite authors: Virginia Woolf. I had an old canvas that I decided to use for this project but you can just as easily use (very) firm cardboard or a piece of wooden board. I covered the canvas in the book pages using mod podge. I spaced the pages quite carefully before I stuck them down, but this isn't really necessary. Then I waited for them to dry before beginning on the silhouette section.

The silhouette section needs to be quite carefully spaced and measured out. I decided that I wanted to have 8 faces on my artwork but this depends on the size of the canvas/piece of cardboard that you are using. I measured the canvas and marked it in pencil into 8 equal sections. For the paper silhouettes I chose 4 pretty pieces of paper that I had (it's better paper rather than cardboard, as cardboard is difficult to cut silhouettes into neatly). I made the silhouette by printing out my image in the right size on paper, sticking onto cardboard and cutting around this with my craft knife. Then I simply traced this onto my pieces of pretty paper and cut out the silhouettes. I stuck these on using mod podge. For the painted faces I stuck masking tape around the edges of the squares. I then placed my template on each square and traced around it. I then hand painted around these pencil marks using acrylic paint. I think it would be easier to place the template cover the rest of the artwork in newspaper and spraypaint it (repeating for each square).

This was the finished result:



  

 

 

 

I think that there are lots of ways that this project could be personalized, some are listed below:

1. By colour (gold could look great).

2. By theme (I could have taken the book theme a few steps further).

Enjoy!