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Twisted Papers...Altered Art
Robin Willis - Altered Deck CrewmemberWelcome back to another month aboard S.S. Reflections! This month I got the honor and privilege of being asked to do a review of a company called Twisted Papers. I needed to show how to use their products in altered art. If you aren’t familiar with Twisted Papers, check out their website at www.twistedpapers.com. They carry a large amount of wonderful CDs jam packed with high-resolution images just waiting for you to print out and use in your art. These include eight volumes of original artwork that are great for backgrounds, vintage advertisements, holiday themed images and more. They also carry collage sheets, paper ephemera and a large amount of real vintage ephemera. This is definitely the place to shop if you are an altered artist!!
Now, I was able to work with the image CDs and found them to be very user friendly. I was able to use the sheet of thumbnails that came with each disk, click on the image I wanted and open it up in my default photo editor. Even the novice computer user will easily be able to open, manipulate and print these images. I received five CDs that contained original art. This artwork is wonderful! There are so many different styles and colors; they are sure to inspire any artist. The disks I used contained anywhere from 62 to 73 images on each. That is a lot of high-resolution images! I also worked with the Vintage Advertisements disk and fell in love with all of the great images that are included. There are 182 images of ads from 1890s to 1920s! One thing I realized right away was these CDs aren’t like a lot of other ones I have seen on the market. The images are crisp and clear. They are large, high-resolution .tiff images so you can print off full sheets of backgrounds and not have fuzzy, pixilated images. They are also easily resized and keep their wonderful details.
Okay, I have to confess that since I am generally a vintage style artist, I tried to stay away from the Vintage Advertisements disk at first. Even when my husband was looking at them he said, “Well, I know you will use that vintage one.” I KNEW I could easily create art with that, but I wanted to try to do many different styles of art to show the versatility of these CDs. I hope that I accomplished that with my creations this month.
For my first sample, I wanted to alter a wooden puzzle I had, but in a different way. It is a small puzzle within its own frame. I wanted to use the puzzle as the base of the art and not alter each puzzle piece individually. I found this pink and turquoise background image and just loved the free, fun feeling it gave me. I really just wanted to use the image and, at first, had no direction for this piece at all. I just let it happen and it became a very fun piece for me. Not my normal style at all, but a favorite of mine now! Okay, I confess, I did use an image from the Vintage Ads disk, too. Can’t keep me away from the vintage stuff!
For my next couple of samples, I decided to play with the images on clay. It has been a long time since I played around with clay, so this proved to be a very fun project. The doll magnet is just that bit of whimsy I needed at the time I was creating. I transferred images to white clay shapes and added glitter to enhance them. The photo frame magnet came about because I wanted to see if the images would transfer as nicely to colored clays as they did to the white. They transferred better! I was very pleased with the crispness of the final pieces.
For my final piece this month, I had to use at least one background in an altered book, right? I found this gorgeous image on a disk and thought it looked like vintage upholstery fabric…beautiful! I used many of the images from the Vintage Advertisements disk to finish off this spread. The gems gave it that final touch that I felt it needed.
I hope you enjoyed my samples this month. I so enjoyed working with these wonderful images from Twisted Papers, and I want to thank Russell and Stan for the opportunity to create artwork using their product!! If you do create artwork using any of the Twisted Papers disks, I would love to see what you come up with.
Until Next Month, Happy Altering!
Robin Willis
robinwillis@ssreflections.com
Altered Arts Deck Crewmember
Reflections Publishing Group, LLC
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