PSA: One must be careful what beverages one drinks after partaking of grapefruit.
In other news, the web is afroth with lamentations over, memorializations of, and editorializations on the subject of the recently departed Pontiff. I thought I would take a moment to share his Letter to Artists.
Dada Journal, entries from February-March 2005
I was asked how I journaled in a book made from magazine pages, so I thought I’d post more examples from my Dada Journal. Sometimes a visual aid works better than an explanation. These entries were from February-March, during the time when the MoonPie of Delight was in the shop (timing belt and cam shaft bolt/pin). There’s also a rant about new “ergonomic” office furniture (any day now!) and a tangent about the original Star Trek series. I’ve now rewatched every episode and I swear William Shatner flashed his breasts more than any other man in the history of teevee. My theory is that the series ended because they ran out of ways for Captain Kirk to lose his shirt.
Dada Journal, Front Cover
Dada Journal, Foredge Open
I thought I’d add some overall photos of the book. For some reason, Hello is acting cranky. It will only upload uncropped versions of the photos, even though they’ve been cropped, resized, rotated, and saved to an entirely different file. Hrmph. So, we’re going with Flickr. I still don’t like the image sizes Flickr provides. The thumbnails are too small and at 240 pixels, the “small” images are too large. Or, maybe I’m just cranky and need to go take a nap in Baby Bear’s bed?
I Shall Not Go to Heaven
assemblage (bone and mirror) with acrylic and ink adhered to watercolor paper
5 1/2 x 3 3/4 inches
These are three steps in the collage process. I started with one of the uglier paintings, figuring I could hardly make things worse. I added a bit of metallic gold ink, which didn’t do a whole lot to help matters. The hand print was a step in the right direction, though. I like the way the metallic gold ink shows through the black ink of the hand print even though the black ink is on top. (And, for once, the metallic quality of the gold ink is actually showing up.) With the addition of a piece of mirror and some tiny chicken rib bones the piece is, I think, complete.
Little Gold Boat
Little Red Boat
acrylic wash and Prismacolor on paper
3 3/4 x 5 1/2 inches
These are a couple of finished pieces from the watercolor collage experiment. The backgrounds were done with watered down acrylic on 140 lb watercolor paper. I used Prismacolor to darken and alter the color of selected areas. The gold boat was made from a piece of Burpee catalog paper coated with metallic gold paste. The red boat was made from origami paper.
acrylic wash and ink on paper
3 3/4 x 5 1/2 inches
I’m obviously still stuck in Blue Land. These are small paintings that will be the bases for collages. I’ve started adding ink and watercolor pencil to some of them. I’ll be adding Prismacolor, more ink, and collage elements, as well.
A Book of Vessels: Tomato Toque
A Book of Vessels: Green Tea
A Book of Vessels: Gorilla Fish
A Book of Vessels: Eden Sundress
These are the latest in my series for the Vessels book. The round spinner dials on many of the collages came from the Dial-a-Tale book I found at a thrift store. I took the book apart and used the cover for a book I made. Most of the illustration from the book are pretty bad, but there were a few I saved, thinking I might be able to use them for collage.
Harriet Brown
pencil on paper
I drew this a few months ago and completely forgot about it. It was done on a blank page in an altered book I was working on at the time.
Red Fleece Journal, Front
6 x 4 inches
140lb Cartiera Magnani hot press watercolor paper
buttonhole binding with coptic and long stitches
Spine
I’ve been wanting to try a buttonhole binding, but, as always, I got hung up on what to do about the cover. Then, I remembered a remnant of fleece I’d bought with the intention of making some braided tug toys for the dogs. The bright red color is cheerful and the fleece is soft on the hands. Since it’s a small book, there was still plenty of fleece left over to make a few tug toys–a win-win solution.
The paper came from my stash of 140lb Cartiera Magnani scraps that were left-over from the Blue Book. There are ten signatures of two folded sheets, so the book has 40 pages.
I ended up attaching the cover a little too tightly to the book, where the eyelets are. At those four points, the cover pulls around the edges of the spine. Next time I’ll be careful to leave a little slack at those points. Other than that, I’m pretty happy with the stitching. It’s nice and tight without being too tight. And, for once, I didn’t tear any of the holes by applying too much pressure.
I’m not a big fan of painting with acrylics, though I use them for priming backgrounds in my journals/sketchbooks and, occasionally, for painting. I do, however, love to use them for dying fabric. Even the ubercheap (44¢/bottle) craft acrylics work well for this. I use about 10-20 parts water to 1 part paint. It’s not a precise measurement–you want to water down the paint enough that it doesn’t affect the hand of the fabric, but not so much that the color becomes washed out. It should look like a nice, rich dye bath. The reason I prefer acrylics over dye is that the acrylic will not fade. In fact, you can even bleach it without lightening the color.
So… I had some left-over paints from the Blue Book and thought I’d use them to dye some of the little paper scraps I’d reserved for making more miniature books. I got out a small mixing bowl and went to work. I combined a pearlized teal with phthalo blue, which made a gorgeous Mediterranean blue. The paper is absolutely beautiful, with just a hint of shimmer. My hands, alas, are also blue. I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, but I couldn’t remove all the blue dye.
Pandora’s Jar
acrylic, Neocolors II, and collage on paper
This is the second spread in the Blue Journal. The background is acrylic, again. The jar was done in Caran d’Ache Neocolors II. I also used Neocolors II to color the fortune cookie slips. Like the previous spread, the tealy colors in this piece did not scan well. I ended up knocking down the saturation and contrast, which helped a bit, but the color itself is still off.
This spread could’ve doubled for the Vessels book. I may end up repeating it there, using a different color scheme.
red paper boat 