Dictionary Page Art....for those who can't draw

Drawing images on top of old dictionary pages is very pretty and very popular now in mixed media. If you're not familiar with it, look here. I haven't made any for one reason...I can't draw.

Then I saw this Book Page Art from Your Printer and now I wonder "why didn't I think of that myself??"  The premise is so simple, simply print images that appear hand sketched onto actual pages from old books.

So I opened my graphic software, found some images that look hand drawn, and printed them out on old pages. Worked like a charm!

Then I ran out of old pages that would fit in my printer. So I googled "dictionary pages," then went to "images" there were tons of images of dictionary pages. I found a few I liked and took those into my graphics program (respect copyright rules and such). I used those images as my bottom layer, put a sketched type image on top and printed. 

This is an image of a dictionary page as well as an image of a rose. I dropped the transparency on the rose so you could see the text through it so it would look hand drawn.

I loved the result so then tried other types of text behind the images...

This was an image of old, yellowed, text, under the bird image.

Then I tried for the 'colored pencil drawing on dictionary page' look...

This was an image of a dictionary page layered under an image of the flowers. I lowered the transparency of the flowers so the text showed through. Then printed this out on my printer.

I've tried all sorts of combinations of "real" pages from old books and even a "ledger" looking page from some old mutual fund prospectus and they all worked fine as long as they were cut to sizes my printer could handle. I've tried many types of images as well.  I prefer the hand drawn look and to make it look more like I've drawn with colored pencils, I drop the transparency a bit on that layer. I've found that once these are included in a collage it's even harder to tell they were printed rather than drawn. There are plenty of free images and free graphics software out there so give this a try.