Altered Book: Artistic Expression

This was the last book of the Altered Books Round Robin from our ABEurope (Yahoo) group that I received to work in.
Serena had chosen the theme: "Artistic Expression under Pressure"

I did not manage to get all the text into one spread, so I added another spread to finish the sentence:
Expres your inner vision - no fear - without limitations.
I just hope that the English words that I used these way were correct! Anyway, Serena is an Italian artist, so with a bit of luck she will not notice any problems with the grammar! :-)

For these spreads I tried to use much layering and different techniques, trying to get rid of some old habits and developing new ways of communicating ideas.
I have been using acrylic inks, paint, paintsticks, stencils, alphabeth stamps, spraying, hand made stamps and embellishements and drawings in pencil!
The book will be send to the US, since Serena recently moved away from Germany. (Normally we keep the Round Robins limited to Europe because of the cost and time of snail mail).

My own book "Truth, Secrets and Lies" came back homely. I thought there would be loads of pages to work in, but the book is filled with artwork from our members. Quite a treasure!

The Hunger Book

TJ, an American artist from Studiomailbox and member/moderator of the ABEurope Group made a book from brown shopping bags for the Round Robin by stitching them together.
Adding gesso and glueing food wrappers in the book to make a statement after seeing people in Berlin begging for food.

One out of 6 people in the world is hungry. Not just having a craving for food, but really hungry because they are too poor or live in a place where no food is available.

Here in the West we have lots of food to choose from, every day again. We often eat more than 3 times a day. We snack in between meals, we drive through 'drive-ins' to get our fast food even faster. In the meantime we are faced with a generation that is overeating or eating unhealthy food.

On the other side, commercial ads and fashion shows models with size 0 on the catwalk and in fashion magazines. Girls growing up are faced everyday with these images and long to look like these so-called role models. The diet market worldwide is worth billions of dollars and a market that is still growing every year.

Looks like we live in a world that's upside down...
In the spread that I made, I used a pizza box to make the super model. Behind the title, my view on the subject is written. Tags with the calory overviews (now mandatory in the Netherlands) of different foods hang from the top of the page.
Tip-ins of the boxes of different foods that I like, are added too.
And yes, I am a vegetarian. I can choose to be this because I can afford to eat every day and have a choice from different vegatarian products.