Heres all the details for the very first Art Quest Challenge! If you want to take part and your not on my yahoo groups your welcome to join in this challenge by posting the links to your challenge art work in the comments section on my blog

Ok here goes – a nice easy one to start you with!!! This requires that you get nice and messy My favourite type of thing to do….

3 Steps Texture Challenge:

Basically for your first 2 page spread in your book I want you to make a fantastic TEXTURED BACKGROUND somewhere on your pages – its up to you how much of your 2 page spread you make into the texture, but it wants to be the main influence on your page. You could cover the entire surface with the texture, or you might want to do one side of the page only or make a strip or a column of texture instead – theres no rules on that score….but…..

Before you run off to make a textured background there IS some rules involved! (wouldnt be too much of a challenge if there wasnt)

The rules are – Your not allowed to use more than 3 steps/items to make the texture!!

Each Textured Background should consist of:

1. The first item your need must be whatever you are going to make your texture with – now this can be ANYTHING at all – Im not going to list obvious choices yet so that I dont influence you too much, as I want you to put your thinking caps on for now… If you get stuck for ideas just shout out and I’ll throw some suggestions out there…

2. The second item you’ll need for the 3 Steps Texture Challenge is some kind of binder to glue or affix the textured item to your page – this can be anything at all, some suggestions are: ordinary glue, amazing glaze, diamond glaze, glossy accents, gesso, mod podge, double sided tape, beeswax and various art mediums etc… anything at all!

3. Your final item for the challenge must be the colour – you can use more than 1 different colour to colorise the background but it MUST be the same colour type – ie all acrylic paints, or all alcohol inkss, or all watercolourss, all lumieres etc etc….

Once youve made your textured backgrounds, upload them on your blogs or in your photo album add a comment to this post with your link to your background to show us what youve done and dont forget to tell us how you did it…

THEN when you’ve done this; you need to complete your page to make it into a completed piece of altered book art – you can go for any theme at all so long as the textured background is the main star on the page (ie. dont cover it up TOO much)….when youve finish scan that in too and upload and post the link so we can all come and drool over it!

Relax and have fun with this challenge – theres no rush, theres no competition and theres no grand prize!! Your only reward is the sheer joy of making something just for the fun of it and experimenting with things which you can make cool textured backgrounds with!

I’ll release another challenge in approx 3-4 weeks time – I’ll probably throw out a new challenge every month (more if requested) And Ive got a list of 80 different challenges in my book to get through yet!!!

Any questions just yell out!