Untold Tales; A Big and Tall Book
Instructor: Katie Kendrick

Spend these three days building a tall and thick mixed media book, full of painted background pages, one or two finished encaustic coated paintings, and snippets of fabric and collage elements strewn through the many pages. You will leave with a book full of pages to fill in future weeks ahead with your own visual journaling and artwork.

Katie will demonstrate how she creates paintings on cardboard, from texturing and aging the background to techniques for painting faces and other imagary. You will get the opportunity to coat your own finished cardboard paintings with hot encaustic wax medium, creating added dimension to both your painting and your book. Learn how to carve cardboard and ways to finish raw edges, how to build a niche in your front cover that, when finished, looks like wax encaustic, but is really a faux encaustic technique using polymer medium. We will cover various ways to pattern and texture journal pages with paint, image transferring techniques, and ways to age pages so they look older. The third day we will assemble and bind our covers and pages into a book using a simple binding method.

Material fee covers:

• Pan of encaustic medium we will be heating up
• bristle brushes
• heat gun, hair dryer,
• wire cutters,
• small hammer,
• oil pastels
• barrier cream and latex gloves
• incising tools
• sand paper
• student packet which includes instructional handout
• fabric and trim bits
• collage images
• ink jet transparency
• use of  instructor’s paints, stencils, tracing paper
• miscellaneous tools and student supplies.

• Heavy cardboard - the best cardboard usually comes from boxes that contained large equipment appliances. If you can’t find the heavy-duty cardboard, lighter cardboard can be glued together in multiple layers to form a heavier page. You’ll need 2 pieces of heavy cardboard for the front and back covers (4 total) plus 4-6 more pieces for interior pages. Plan on bringing a minimum of 8-10 pieces of 17” x 6” cardboard.
• Heavy white/light colored paper for pages - the paper needs to be heavy enough to paint and collage onto. If it is colored paper you can paint it with white gesso if you like. Examples include recycled brown paper grocery bags, watercolor paper, cardstock weight paper, etc. You may want to combine a variety of papers. I found a thick stack of record album paper jackets at the thrift store (they didn’t have the hole in the middle) and used those for many of my pages so keep an eye out for usual sources as well. Make sure most of the paper you bring is at least twice the width and the full length of your finished book. You may want to include some undersized pages in the mix for interest as well.
• You’ll need four to five 12” x 17” papers per signature (and an optional smaller page or two if you like), and anywhere from 5-7 signatures depending how thick you want your book.That means you’ll bring 25 - 35 papers to paint, front and back, measuring at least 12” x 17”, plus any smaller paper you want to insert.
• Lightweight chipboard or matboard material for the spine, 17” x 6”
• Book binding needle or tapestry needle
• Several big binder clips
• Heavy awl for poking holes in signatures
• Waxed linen
• Straight edge ruler, at least 18” long
• Self healing mat and box cutter
• Exacto knife and blades
• Sobo glue - for gluing fabric, small bottle
• Acrylic soft gel medium 16 oz container
• White gesso, 16 oz container
• Clear gesso, 16 oz container (Liquitex is my favorite brand; Windsor Newton also makes it)
• Self Leveling Clear Gel, made by Golden, an 8 ounce container is plenty
• Acrylic paints - I prefer the cheap craft paints like FolkArt for painting backgrounds on the pages and you will go through quite a bit of paint covering 35 pages, front and back. I use neutral and muted or pastel colors for the most part. Choose paints that will work well blended with one another, think 2-3 paints per spread. You can vary the triads from page to page if you wish. Some of my favorite colors right now are: Italian sage, basil green, mushroom, raw umber, sky blue, french blue, dove gray, yellow ochre, sunflower, lemonade, vintage white, tapioca, linen, parchment. For painting images, bring a variety of paints - you might want to include some highly pigmented Golden paints for this. For flesh tones on faces my favorite colors are Golden titanium white, nickel azo gold, paynes gray, and quinacridone crimson although you can use any white, red, blue, and yellow you wish. Include black, white, burnt umber, as well as the primaries mentioned above and any other colors you like.
• Paint brushes - - large flat brush, size 16 or bigger, 2-3 couple cheap 1” chip brushes (the ones with the wooden handles and bristles in the paint section of hardware store), a couple rounds, medium (#6, #10) liner brush #1 for detail work
• pencil and eraser
• Collage images -  anything that appeals to you, scaled-down prints of your own original artwork or photographs, clip art, text, etc...
• Fabric, lace, ribbon, scraps  - bits and pieces to embellish here and there on the pages if you are planning on bringing your sewing machine.
• Lace fabric to cover spine board - 7.5” x 17” (Any fabric you want - I used lace in the sample)
• Tsukineko Antiquing Solution - This comes in a 2 oz. spray bottle, my favorite is the Java Walnut Ink but there are at least 3 other colors available. Available at A.C. Moore, many scrap booking stores online.
• Paint rags
• Rusty wire - to cover the cut-out nook on the front cover
• Small flattish object(s) - to place in the cut-out cover nook and a small bit of soft fabric (I used cheesecloth) or lichen or ?? to put under your small objects.
• Scissors for paper
• Scissors for fabric
• Hairdryer - to speed up drying time of painted pages
• Roll of masking tape
• Roll of wide brown paper tape
• Paint apron or smock to protect your clothing

ADDITIONAL PROGRAM INFORMATION