Snow

Snow
composition book journal

It snowed again today, though it wasn’t very cold. The temperature hovered around freezing this morning then rose over the day. I can hear melted snow dripping on the metal awnings over the living room windows. Tap, tap-tap, tap, tap-tap. The dogs had a blast playing bitey-face and digging for moles. They came inside with snow on their backs, mud caked on their paws and noses, and happy smiles on their faces.

Early in the morning, the heavy, swirling snow turned the trees a ghostly grey. The low contrast between the two was beautiful, so I thought I’d try to capture it. Naturally, I took some pictures, but I decided to try a spread in my composition book journal. I painted the pages bright white. It took several coats and dried to a super high gloss finish. Nothing would stick to it, so I sanded it. Then I got out my grey, brush-tip Pitt pens and doodled a tree. It was a little too flat, so I rubbed the ink around with a Q-tip. That worked pretty well. The rough texture left by the sandpaper works nicely against the soft shading made by the Q-tip.

Because of the glossiness of the paint, I had trouble scanning the image. I ended up scanning it in grey-scale. I increased the contrast. The original is much more subtle, but I just couldn’t duplicate that subtlety on-screen.

On another technical note, I’ve been toying around with applying paint in different ways, trying to minimise the stretching and buckling that frequently happens when working with such thin, cheap paper. Despite what looks like large waves in the paper, especially on the right-hand page, the paper stayed almost completely flat. I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out. Once the journal has been shut and weighted overnight, this spread should be nice and flat. To achieve that, I applied a very thin coat of paint with a credit card, gently squeegeeing the paint across the paper. I was careful not to over-work the paper, though, which made a huge difference in how much it stretched. I also waited for it to dry completely before I put subsequent coats on, which is something I haven’t done in the past. Allowing the first coat to dry and seal the page makes a huge difference. There is almost no stretching along the spine edge, which is something I’ve been struggling with.

Now that I’ve done my arting for the day, I’m off to vegetate in front of some bad television and drink a cup of Breathe Easy tea.