Altered Book: Truth, Secrets and Lies

The new Round Robin has been organised on the Altered Book Europe Group on Yahoo. It took a while for me to get to work on it. I intended not to sign up for this Round Robin since I still have loads of work to do, untill I saw the first pictures being uploaded by group members...
The books they had altered were so beautiful that I wanted to join anyway! Luckily I had already a book prepared for altering and a list of themes I would like to work with.

The cover is very textured. It first started out as a painted cover with 3D letters glued to it. But I felt that it was not good enough - so I started glueing down all kinds of threads and yarns. Very messy work since the glue sticks more to the fingers than to the yarns and covers of course.
To keep everything together, I added pieces of tissuepaper to cover everything and added again some layers of paint.
As usual the picture does not bring out the textures that well...
I choose the theme Truth, Secrets and Lies. My intend was to write down little truths, secrets and lies down and cover them with layers of paint and collage - leaving bits to be readable and let the viewer decide what was a truth, a secret or a lie.
Guess I am not ready yet to do that - instead I started with some quotes about Lies and Truth.
The book will be send to Germany, and then travel through Europe to France, Danmark and the United Kingdom for other artists to work in.
When the book gets home, there will still be some pages left for me to write down my truths, secrets and little lies... For my eyes only... :-)

Just back from Scotland...

Just got back from an EPZ (Ephotozine.com) Meet in Scotland. Fifty photographers sharing one hostel at the shores of Loch Lomond! Literally chasing the light in the Highlands because of the rain, sleet and snow.
A lot of fun in the evenings, but quite exhausted after the meet... We made some new friends, met old friends again and met people in person that we only knew before from the website, often just the avatar name!

For the first time I tried my new Sigma 10-20 mm wide angle lens which is perfect to capture landscapes. But it also distorts the view which made it harder for me to compose good shots.
Back home reviewing the photographs that I took, I felt that I better also had used my old 18-55 mm lens...

Scotland is a great country to be in. I like the remoteness and the roughness of this country. Nature rules here and you simply have to adjust to it. I was so glad that I brought some waterproof boots, warm gloves (thin enough to fiddle with the dials on the camera), warm silly hat, waterproof pair of trousers and a windproof jacket lined with a fleece!
Otherwise I would have had to shelter in the car most of the time. Especially since we spent 2 days in Glencoe.
The weather changes there by the hour. Which gives one hope - is it raining, you can wait in the car untill it stops (maybe even for just 10 minutes or so).

This was the last EPZ Meet at Rowardennan that Davie organised. Still I hope that it is not the last time that hubbie and I visited Glencoe, Lomond and the Trossachs. There are so many beautiful places to capture!