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Artistic Journeys: Altered Art 101
By Dana Driscoll
Recently, my mother and I stopped at a yard sale. It was a great sale—full
of lots of old antiques, books, junk boxes to root through, and so forth. As
we were walking around the garage, I stopped next to a basin filled with
old rolling pins. I looked at mom and I said, “Look at these! What a find!” I
grabbed up two of them and she said back, “Dana, what could you possibly
need with two? One for the kitchen I understand, but two?” I replied, “Mom,
I’m going to use one to make cookies and alter the one as a gift for one of
my Secret Santa art partners!” She just laughed and said, “Of course!”
Altered art has been all the rave in the last few years. But what exactly is
it and how far can you go? This article will define altered art, provide lots
of examples, and provide some common techniques to use when altering
using a sample art project—the altered wooden rolling pin!
What is Altered Art?
Webster’s dictionary defines “alter” as “to make different without changing
into something else.” When we combine this with “art”, we get something
like the following: “To take an ordinary object and, using artistic techniques,
make it different without changing it into something else.” In other words,
the object you are working on becomes “altered” through art but not entirely
changed. With altered art, it’s important that some of the original object
remains (such as the pages on a book or the base of the spoon you are
altering).
These alterations can be anything and everything you can think of. This
includes hand-painted, collaged, digitally altered, hand-drawn, sewn,
stitched, stamped, glazed, splattered, sprayed, sanded, distressed, and
more. A lot of altered art is mixed media (i.e. more than two mediums)
because altered art lends itself well to this kind of work.
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The sky is the limit
when it comes to
altering!
Here are some common
and not so common
objects to alter:
• Spoons/silverware
• Dominos
• CDs
• Game pieces (Scrabble
tiles, etc)
• Shoes
• Books
• Tables/furniture
• Kitchen utensils
• Keyboards/electronics
• CDs
• Ccomputers/iPods
• Tins/boxes
• Bottles
• Matchboxes
• Mirrors
• Clothing
• Keys
•
Luggage tags