Fixing deserted pages

After feeling as if I was coming to the end of my journey for this topic, I looked back through my sketchbook and was shocked to find about four to five pages that were completely deserted. Some had previous projects on that I had obviously given up on and other were just blank, I 'm still not sure why they were blank but I fixed them. 

Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of this page before it's improvements, which has left me extremely annoyed with myself because I feel that it is a big improvement. The page did have a newspaper stuck down and torn away to try to reveal some pictures. However it just looked ridiculous, nothing went to together well, half the photos were ripped up and it was just not acceptable. Therefore I decided to use what I have learnt now from my experiments to refine and fix it. I mixed together white paint and glue, painted a thin layers on top of the newspaper and left it to dry. I wanted to use newspaper because I knew it would look really effective when I began to peel the paint back. I didn't feel that the white looked good enough therefore I decided to add some red paint. This added colour to the pasty white and gave it a pleasing overall look. As mentioned before, I did want to just peel it back, because I know that it would have worked well with newspaper. However when I tried it, only the top layer of newspaper was torn off. Therefore I decided to use a palette knife to push back the paint. Overall I am happy with how this turned out, I feel that it links to my theme of layers revealing layers. The texture created on this piece was amazing, so I will consider taking pictures of it using my macro lense.

Thankfully I remembered to photograph this piece before hand. I despise this piece, it looks awful. It was originally orange and yellow inks in which I created expressive marks with. I didn't really like how the piece turned out anyway, it drew attention away from a piece I did like on the page next to it, therefore I decided to paint over it. I originally used white emulsion paint, however when painting it onto the piece, the water from the paint brush made the ink run again. The ink was obviously dry but wet paint brush made it begin to run. Therefore painting it over in white made it worse. I must have got very annoyed and left it to dry then just moved onto my other pieces because this was the state that I found it in. So what could I even do with this? I decided to try paint over it again, since it already had a thick layers of emulsion over it, I decided that it would just try to paint over it again. I mean, it couldn't really get any worse.  The second layer of paint worked fine. It managed to cover up the smudge ink and leave me a reasonable surface to work on. I decided to stick newspaper down onto it. I feel that using the newspaper helps create a nice surface to work upon. Therefore I covered it in newspaper, and then added white paint layered upon the newspaper. This overall looked ok, but thats the thing, it only looked ok. So I decided to add some red paint to it, I feel that this worked well, it emphasized the texture within the newspaper and white paint. I then decided to pull back some parts of the newspaper, to reveal hidden layers underneath. However this did not turn out too well as it ripped up the two protecting layers of paint I had created. This allowed patches of the coloured ink to show through, which I feel looked tacky. I think that this ruined the overall look of the piece, because it is covered with strange blotches of different coloured ink. To conclude, I don't think I refined this, I made it more textured but also added more colour to it whilst doing it, which wasn't what I originally wanted.