Secrets of the Sea Altered Book Spread

I have finished work in a book for my Art Groups Round Robin. This month's task was to create a spread in a book titled "Secrets of The Sea".

This is the first page. I took a very old map of "Oceana"- now the South Pacific, and covered the first page of Trina's book. I then created an overlay of a transparency of a poem from an very old children's reader sewn to a piece of blue vellum.

This shows the map page without the overlay. I added the cut out fish from an old children's Encyclopedia.

Several pages of the original book had to be removed to make room for the art work ,so I chose to use the page tabs as part of the layout. I covered each page stub with papers and then added photos taken at my favorite beaches on Cape Cod. These are my own photographs.

For the remaining page of the spread, I found a wonderful page from the same Children's Encyclopedia, depicting the creatures that live on the ocean floor. I knew that I wanted to hide a mermaid in amongst the rocks, so I cut a slit in the page and carefully adhered the picture to the book page without closeing up the created pocket. I then added all sorts of green fibers to the top of the page as a curtain of seaweed. This added another layer and hid the mermaid even more.

At the bottom of the spread I added "rocks" created from painted and ironed Tyvek.

The basis of the mermaid was an image that I cut from a piece of mermaid fabric. I added the tyvek tail and some stabilizing interfacing and backed the whole thing with cardstock. I then coated her with several layers of varnish for strength and durability.

As you see probably tell, i had a good deal of fun with this project! I topped the whole thing of with strands of shells that I had collected from one of my favorite Cape Cod beaches.