Adding Colour to Your Pages
This is the wet and messy portion of the project so prepare your workspace accordingly. Have paper towels on hand for clean up and put plastic down to keep your area dry and clean. Depending upon the media you use, the colour may stain your hands so gloves may be an idea. Definitely wear a coverup or apron.
Don't forget to refer to the Reference Page for links to additional videos for more colouring techniques by professionals. They do a better job than I do and you'll definitely learn more tips from them.
The following videos show how I have added colour to my fabric:
Adding Colour to Fabric Part ll
Finished Results of Adding Colour
When the colour is dry, remember to heat set your work. I always place my work between pieces of parchment paper to protect both my work surface and my iron. Look at the manufacturer's directions for the heat temperature for your particular product.
I almost forgot, in the Adding Colour Part ll video, I mentioned Pastel Dye Sticks and Fabric Crayons. The following video shows my experiment using them to add colour to unbleached cotton.
Pastel Dye Stick and Fabric Crayon Experiment
Sorting Your Pages
Once you've added colour to the background, you will want to make sure that you put the fronts and backs of your double page spreads together. You might have planned this order in advance, before you added the colour or this might be something that you decide after the colour has been added. In the case of my first journal, it was something that I decided after the colour was added. I played around with my pages until I came up with a pleasing combination.
Not only will you need to take into account the front and back of the spread, you will also want to see what the facing pages look like. Facing pages are the folded pages that are next to each other when a book is opened. Fold all the double pages in half and stack them up in a pile and open them one by one, as though they are pages in a book. What do the facing pages look like when they are side by side? What does the back of one page look like next to the front of another? Those are facing pages.
When you have the colours of the facing pages arranged in a way that is pleasing, you'll need to remember the order. I used a small piece of masking tape on the wrong sides of the pages to label them 1A 1B,2A 2B, etc. so I wouldn't have to go through that process again. That way, when I was working on the fronts and backs individually and out of order, I had an easy way of getting them into the order that I wanted. "A" was the front, "B" was the back and 1,2,3 was the page order.
Now I could go to the next step, which was planning where to put my fabric motifs.
Extras
As promised, the questions from lesson 2 were videotaped when demonstrations were provided. The video is below.
An additional question came in about designing for facing pages. That is easier to show than it is to explain so here is the video demonstrating how to plan for designs that will cross facing pages.
I am currently working on an eight panel accordion book made from unbleached cotton. I used the dye based watercolours to add background colour to the long strip of cotton I'm using for my background.
Applying Accordion Book Background Colour
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