Make an old, unwanted book into a creative outlet. These amazing creations can be made using virtually any art supplies and can make for hours of artwork. The art book is easy, cheap, and fun to use again and again.

There are plenty of fun additions you can make to the book and with hundreds of pages it makes for a long lasting sketch book and an interesting hobby.

Step 1: Step 1: What Will You Need?

Because this is an art book, virtually any art supplies for do. In this instance, a large variety of different supplies were used for different pages and parts of the book. Some of the main supplies used include:

Paint (plain or shimmery)
Sharpies
Brush Markers
Sharpie Pens
Crayons
Candles
Ribbon
Tissue Paper
Stencils
Food Coloring
Beads
Glue

Step 2: Step 2: the Cover

First of all, you'll need to design the cover. In this case I had to first pry free the dust cover glue to get to the book cover. After that a metallic paint was use along the spine of the cover. For the front and back of the covers a layer of glue was layed down and a color variety of tissue paper was used on the cover. To avoid creases in your tissue paper you may want to lay something flat and heavy on top of the cover, such as a textbook. Otherwise you can even use the creases to create a design in the tissue paper. The cover will need to be left to dry for anywhere to a half hour to a couple hours. All depending on the type of glue and the amount of layering.

Step 3: Step 3: Paint

In the step of filling up the pages, it is really up to you what you choose to do with the pages that lay within. But simply for suggestion here are the things I have chosen to fill my own art book.

For paint it was fun but timely. Any paint will do for the paper in regular books. In my case, child's finger paint and metallic acrylic paint was used. With paint it is simple to mess around with color palates and find colors that mix well together on the pages. For most of the pages it would take about 10-20 minutes to dry each with one layer of paint. You'll want to prop the book open using something in order to keep the pages from sticking to one another (though that can sometimes lead to some very cool, clashing colors.)

Step 4: Step 4: Food Coloring

With food coloring, things may get a bit messy. In my instance I used the cover of one of my old sketchbooks beneath the book when working on these pages in order to keep from staining anything unintentionally. As well as not laying the pages against other pages unless you are going for a leaked effect on the pages under. In this step I found it best to use a pin to draw the food coloring into bigger shapes. Both the pointed and the ball end can be used to shape the designs.

Another cool technique is to drip the food coloring down the page and layer the colors over one another.

Due to the amount used for the food coloring pages, they would usually take about an hour to dry fully on all areas of the page.

Step 5: Step 5: Stencils

For this step I used chosen stencils on pages that I had already painted in acrylic paints. I drew the outlines in pen before coloring them over. Depending on the marker and the paint, they may be more or less difficult to color over. Another idea would be to use a Sharpie pen to outline your stencils as they seem to work better on paint than regular pens.

Step 6: Step 6: Crayon Melting

For this step I chose to do a drip effect. Using a lighter, I tilted the tip of the crayon over the flame and the page to create drips over each page. I separated the blue and purple between the pages though any mixture of colors or techniques for melting the wax over the pages could be used. For this one I estimate a good hour to ensure the wax has dried with something to hold the book open and flat.

Step 7: Step 7: Drawings

For this step you can use any techniques you want. A fun idea being using the words within your drawings to make more use of the page rather than just paper. Get creative and if you have artist's block you can always read what's on the page you plan to work on for inspiration. Branching out and trying to draw things you never have is always a good experience and helps you grow as an artist.