I’m still on my cleaning spree, and while most old school things I find are totally irrelevant today (including a list of 20 art links that were all dead except for two museum sites) every now and then I find a gem.

One nice thing I found was a list of ideas for altered books, which is great since my Art Club kids each have one. I wish I knew who wrote the original list, but here’s the new improved version with a few of my own ideas included.

1. Use crayons and watercolors to create a wax resist. Use a white crayon or rubber cement to make “invisible” lines.
2. Glue two pages together (to make them more sturdy) and cover them with watered down gesso, with or without a tint of color. Sand the pages and draw on them with a pen.
3. Copy a picture of your own onto a transparency sheet and tape it into your book. When flipped one way or the other, how does it relate to the work behind it?
4. Create a 50/50 glue/water mix and use it to stick colored tissue paper to a page.
5. Cut shapes from thin cardboard and place them under a page. Rub over the page with a spoon to emboss it.
6. Cut apart two images (your own, pages from magazines, photocopies, or any combination) and weave them together.
7. Outline an image with liquid glue and let it dry, then color it with watercolors and/or colored pencils.
8. Cut out pictures of arms, legs, torsos, and heads and glue them together to create collages of new people or monsters.
9. Circle words on a page to create a “found word” free verse poetry. Color over the selected words with white crayon, then use markers to cover the rest of the page with an illustration that describes the poem.
10. Cut three pages into thirds horizontally, and draw a person (or house, car, machine, etc.) on each page. Try to get the body parts of each person to line up so you can flip through the top, middle, and bottom separately to create new artworks.
11. Save postcards, receipts, and other flat souvenirs from your next vacation. Use them to create a collage.
12. Cut apart a page with nothing but words on it and glue those words together to tell a new story. illustrate it on the next page.

Additional ideas are more than welcome.