13 Oct 2015: What to do with Old Copies of your Books

While on a recent cleaning streak through my apartment, I came across the boxes of old copies of my books. They are the paper copies that I used to edit. I’m old school and like to hand edit my books with a pen. Anyway, I did at time need to reference an older copy of the book and so kept these copies in a box. Well … actually three large boxes now taking up residence in my one closet for storage. Yet, I’m a sentimental fool and hate to toss them out. They are the story of how my books came to be. So I came up with the idea to do an art project with them. Usually I paint for art projects, but this time I did a collage of my first novel, The Purity of Blood. It’s quite large, 30×40 inches, but then again, it’s a long book!

How did I make it? I bought a pre-made canvas at Michael’s and some Mod Podge to do the decoupage with. It’s basically white glue. I used a foam brush to apply the glue to the pieces of my book that I cut out.

I trimmed the edges as much as possible so that more of the text would show through and also picked pages that had my favorite spots in the book or really good hand written edits. I also added in some maps of the areas my book is set as well as a few other little items of interest.

Yet, when I was just about finished, it still seemed to be lacking something, so I splattered red paint on it to look like blood. It’s a vampire love story after all!