Antiquing Maps

When I did Lori's Books, the map for the cover didn't fit with the rest of the book. So I antiqued the map to make it look older. I used distilled water and acrylics and brushed a thin layer (as thin as watercolor) over the top of the map. I liked the cover insets so well that I decided to do the same antiquing on the end papers on the inside.

I did a large sheet of it but this was a left over piece that I used for a pocket on the back inside cover. It held the colophon for the book. This photo below shows the paper before I cut out the pocket. You can see the difference of the bright blue paper and the antiqued greener (beautiful,beautiful) paper.

I may never be able to use this paper again without antiquing it first!

Tea Staining Archivally

So, I've had real issues putting nice clean archival paper into tea and making it acidic just for the wonderful effect of my making it look old. This was the end of my trial process in trying to figure out how to do it archivally. At first, I tried using my archival printing inks. I mixed (a TON!) of ink trying to get the color right. The color always looked nice on the glass and in the pan when I mixed it with ph neutral water, BUT when I dipped the paper in and baked it, it would always have way too much blue. It also didn't give the same effect as the tea. So, I scoured the internet again looking for information and I talked with Daniel about it. He's been looking into archival papers lately because he's been doing illustrations for kids. I learned a few things from talking with him and I came to understand how to go about making archival tea stained paper. Because our environment is naturally acidic, 7-8.5 on the pH scale is considered archival. Overtime things in the environment will pick up the acidity and become less alkaline. Some papers are buffered with Sodium Bicarbonate for this very reason. So...I tried adding a little sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) to my tea/water mixture and tested it to make sure it was archival. Voila! Tea stained pages with a neutral to alkaline pH. I'll get a tutorial up of this soon.

Aging Maps

Aging the map for the front cover of Lori's Books.

I've been playing with aging the paper. I didn't want to use tea like I usually do to stain pages since the tea is acidic and I didn't want to put something acidic on a photo album that is completely archival. :)

So I used acrylics mixing cadmium yellow medium, cadmium red medium, ultramarine blue and just a touch of ivory black to create a sort of burnt umber and then put a thin layer of that on the map.

The water colors...no idea what colors I used. They're the two far end colors that have been on my palette for years but they turned out nicely.

I'm sorry the photo of it is on it's side.