Storybook Art

There is an art project that I'd been wanting to do for a really long time. I got the idea from something I saw on Pinterest - someone had painted a picture on the page of a book. I loved the idea of combining text and illustration, and immediately came up with a project I wanted to try - taking a page of text from three of my favourite children's stories, and painting a picture on them of what the text was describing. I wanted to do it as something to put up in Steven's room. At that time we were still living in the townhouse, so Steven didn't even have a room yet, and anyways I was busy and couldn't find the time. So the project waited.

But this week I was finally able to find time for my storybook art project!

Probably the trickiest part was deciding how to get the text of the book excerpts I wanted to use. Of course, there was no way I was going to tear a page out of a book! Especially a book I enjoy. Perhaps the only exception would be if a copy of the book was absolutely falling apart and was about to be thrown out, but I didn't really want to take forever trying to find such copies of the specific books I wanted. I considered photocopying the pages, but it's hard to get a good quality photocopy of a page from a book. In the end I typed out the text from the pages I wanted, which actually worked quite well, because I could format them the way I wanted them.

The texts I chose were the beginning of The Hobbit, the lamppost passage from The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the end of the epilogue from one of the Redwall books, Marlfox.

I used a mixture of glue and water to attach my "book pages" to three canvases. There ended up being some wrinkles in the paper, but I thought it still looked ok. For my illustrations I used acrylic paint, but I watered it down so that you would still be able to read the text behind it.

The finished artwork hanging in Steven's room! I am so pleased with how it turned out!

If you were to make storybook art, which stories would you choose?