Reinventing an old book

So here's a fun project I've been meaning to post. Last fall was the birthday of one of my besties, a gal who has a thing for kitties. Well way back in the summer, I had run across an old library book at an antique store – a children's book from the seventies called I Like Cats. This two-dollar treasure featured hilariously cheesy photos of kids and kittens, paired with profundities like “Cats are fun. I like them.” I knew that in some form or another, it was going to become a gift for my kitten-loving friend, so I bought it without much of a plan.

I'm sure at some point this book had a dust jacket, but by now it was long gone, leaving a blank surface of that plasticky linen texture that certain old books have, like enamel-painted cloth. That shiny mustard-colored canvas was begging for embellishment, preferably something in an equally jarring color. A hot-pink kitten, of course!

Now the ideal method for an application like this would be screen printing, but the elaborate screen-preparation process only really pays off if you're doing a whole run of a design, and I didn't have any immediate plans for plastering kitten silhouettes on things. (Though now that I say that, I'm not sure why not... :-) ) So, I opted to make a stencil out of contact paper, and use it to paint the design on in acrylic. I ran into a bit of a glitch along the way, but I think it still came out well.

First, I found pictures of cute kittens on the internet. Just about the easiest thing there is to do, really! Though, I did have to limit myself to ones that would produce an easily read silhouette shape. I selected the one with the best outside contours, printed it out to size, and used my lightbox to trace the outline onto the contact paper.

I can't remember why, but I decided to stick the contact paper to my clear cutting mat, and put the picture underneath. I think it was because with the backing attached, the contact paper wasn't laying out flat enough – it was a scrap that had been stored rolled up for a while. I then cut the shape out with an Xacto, peeled up the stencil, and pressed it down again on the book.

I applied a few layers of acrylic paint until I had a nice even coat. And then I found my glitch: the stencil hadn't really adhered very well, and I had major bleeding under. I'm not sure if this would have happened or not if I hadn't stuck and un-stuck the contact paper. It may just be a function of the bumpy texture of the surface of the book. Next time I will just go ahead and get proper stenciling supplies. Anyway, the kitten was suddenly much, much fluffier than I had intended, and in a very messy-looking way.

All I could do was go with it, and paint all the edges over by hand, so that it at least looked neat. This rather negated the benefit of using a stencil, because in the end I had to form the edges of the shape by hand. But at least the center part was a nice flat coat, which would have been hard to achieve without the stencil which allowed me to use broad, unidirectional brush strokes. And, since kittens come in varying degrees of fluffiness, the resulting shape was still entirely believable. But it's a good thing I didn't start out with a Persian!