This is Eli Zucker; he is 12 and a wonderful artist. Eli first came to work with me after I met his family at their garage sale last summer. His mom and I got to talking and one thing led to another. Eli had a background in pottery, so we first worked with Precious Metal Clay (PMC). He actually made some of the charms for his altered book from the PMC. He decided to do an altered book because he wanted to explore mixed media art. His book is all about his life, what he does in school, and his favorite things. We have been working on it just about once a week for 2 hours at a time.
I suggested some ideas, like when he wanted to do a page on his favorite foods and got stumped about how to set the page up. I threw out several ideas such as a menu page. He liked that idea and took off on his own from there. We also looked at the many books and magazines I have and got inspiration from there too. Eli doesn’t know how to use a lot of the different materials and a lot of what I have taught him is about how to set eyelets, or how to use the heat gun and emboss areas, what kind of glue to use with metals versus papers, how to layer different colors and build up a texture. I believe he will be able to use this knowledge in all areas of his art in the future.
