It all starts with a copy of National Geographic and a bottle of Citrasolv! If you are not familiar with Citrasolv, it is a citrus-based cleaner concentrate. There are a number of videos on Youtube showing how to use this product with National Geographic pages, as well as info on the citrasolv site.
The idea is to dissolve the inks on the page until the picture is abstract and unrecognizable. This process only seems to work on National Geographic pages! After making a number of these abstract pages, I scanned the (dried) pages and used them to create digital collages. I usually make some changes to the scanned backgrounds and even combine more than one of them with Photoshop layers. For instance, the photo below combines two different Citrasolv pages...
Then it is just a matter of adding layer after layer of images and text. In the first photo above, I scanned some drawings that were in my own sketchbook and added them. In the beach picture, I used a photo I had taken of my granddaughter, Angel, at the beach. In some of the collages, I use Dover clipart, or, as in the angel photo above, a face from historic artwork. The photo below is an untouched, scanned Citrasolv background....I have already started a collage using this page. You will notice that on the left some of the original National Geographic photo shows through. The rest is all dissolved and textural.
I will share the collage I created from this in a future post!
