Harvinaisen Kaunis Elämä: Book of Whispers - an Altered Vintage Book Cover for Finnabair

As much as I love creating art journals, I do adore the moment I can concentrate on the cover and make it look like a gate to a secret world. I only do it after the actual journal, to be able to make the cover tell the same story that’ll be in the inside. However, now I needed to make an exception: I had an altered vintage book project on the making but the vintage leather cover leaked colour badly and stained everything. Why not to create something as my Creative Team project, I thought, and simply started filming the process!

I started with covering the vintage book covers with tissue papers, to prevent the crumbling leather to leak through badly, and attached it with Soft Matte Gel, making sure the tissue paper crinkled nicely to make an interesting background. Then I primed the covers with white Heavy Gesso to give a sort of blank starting point to work with.

I used the gorgeous new Machinery stencil with Modeling paste to create a patterned look for the front cover. (The back cover I left without stencil; the crinkled tissue paper itself is such a beautifully simplified effect.) Next, I chose the embellishments and ended up using only the simplest of composition: a large Grungy Frames mould frame and a Scrapyard Dragonfly attached with Heavy Body Gel, and a tiny amount of Mini Art Stones scattered around the frame with Soft Matte Gel.

Painting is one of my favourite things in the whole wide world, so of course I painted several layers, first mixing Impastos Snow White, Linen, and Manor Blue with a tiniest hint of Dark Chocolate, to give the cover a light stormy sky grey wash, and then using Dark Chocolate and Pitch Black adding shadowing to the cover edges and around the frame. And, because I love layers, I mixed Liquid Acrylics Ink Black, Umber, and Burnt Sienna for more vintage-ish distressing effect, and with a baby wipe and spray bottle added a gentle paint layer to the covers, highlighting the stencil pattern and Mini Art Stones.

With a hint of Ochre and Vintage Silk Waxes, I highlighted the frame and the cover edges, and splattered some white acrylic paint for the cover as a finishing touch.

And that was it. It was a quick project, a fun one. The new Machinery stencil has such a beautiful, airy light and versatile pattern that it does not need much else to make a lovely, harmonious composition and I can already see this is going to be my favourite stencil for all kind of projects!

Here’s a link to my tutorial video: https://youtu.be/uFUSClBAUik

Thank you for popping by!

Emilia