Books!

I'm nuts about books. I love to read books, look at books, shop for books, and to make books. And lately, I've been doing just that, making books. This house book was for a Round Robin and swap on our TreasureArtTrends group, inspired by an entry in a January Interweave Press Embellishments newsletter (the one for Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine) written by Leilani Pierson and taken from her article in the Nov/Dec 2008 CPS.

This is my book for the round robin. The generic binder rings will be changed out for a ribbon when I get it back home and finished. I think it's my favorite book I've ever made, except maybe for my first Laguna Binding book that I used for my very first round robin.

This pink book was done for the swap.

So was this blue and brown book. I just had to try out my new Red Lead stamp. It was hard not to keep this one! The paper under the paint and gesso and ink is taken from an old atlas someone gave me. It's a map of South America, swiped with a light layer of gesso, some light turquoise heavy body acrylic, and then stamped on with my favorite sepia colored Archival Ink pad.

This blue and brown book was made with some paper my friend, Bev, gifted to me when her local paper arts store had a huge sale and closed. These colors and textures together just get me excited!

And finally, here's the first book I made for the exchange. Love Shack by the B-52s is my personal theme song and the ringtone on my cell phone. So I had to keep this one!

Here's My Big 2009 Holiday Project

Here's the smaller file, if you don't have the bandwidth or time to wait for the bigger file to load or if you're viewing on your iPhone or Droid!

I'm working on a way to share the large file. It's 62 MB, but you can see the pages really well.

For the last month or so, I've spent a bit of my creative time working on getting this recipe book together for members of my favorite Yahoo art group, TreasureArtTrends. This is a slide show set to music of the pages inside it that were done by me and ten of my online friends. (I did the covers. They're digital collage with elements bought from Designer Digitals and put together with PhotoShop Elements 7.0, then hand-embellished.) I assembled the book with a spiral binding. This is done with a special punching machine.

Each includes a favorite recipe for the holidays. In one case, I requested a recipe, the one for pavlova, a signature Australian desert, done by an Australian member. The pages were to be 5" high and 7" wide, the theme is Christmas, and they had to include at least one recipe. Many of the recipes ended up being tucked into pockets or cards while some are on the backs of the pages. Just a warning: in these photos, you can't always see the recipes.

The music is Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Wizards in Winter from their The Lost Christmas Eve album. This music is a favorite with me all year 'round. The Sports Fan and I always start our holiday season by attending TSO's concert here in Phoenix, which we did two weeks ago.

I think that every style of Christmas decor is included in this small, but very chunky book.

Enjoy! And Merry Christmas!

Street Team Challenges

As you know, I love participating in Michelle Ward's Street Team Challenges. This one is a follow-on from a previous challenge I missed, due to being stressed out already.

For my BookArtz Songbook project, I really wanted to use both a stencil and a hand-carved stamp. I made both. In fact, I made three stencils but only used one and didn't use either version of the stamp I carved.

So here's what happened. First, I dug out my carving medium and drew my Beatles logo that was used on Ringo's drum kit freehand on some paper with a fine-tip black Micron pen. I did a pretty good job. Not surprising as I am fairly good at lettering, especially if I can have a second go at it. And drawing from a visual reference makes it so much easier.

I transferred it to the medium by covering it with a really dark black soft pencil, laying it on top and rubbing. That worked well and I started carving with an X-acto knife and a #11 blade. This knife is one of my favorite tools. I like it so much that I have a second one to keep in one of my traveling art kits. And I couldn't find my Speedball carving set, of course.

In the past, I have always used regular wood-mounted linoleum blocks for printing. They are hard to carve, but well worth the effort. Linoleum produces nice crisp lines and has little grain. Because the surface is painted a different color from the inside, you can easily see if you've strayed from the line or made a tiny overcut. It doesn't wobble when you print with it, doesn't distort with pressure, and it is easy to load with ink.

I no longer have the package it came in, but this carving medium is white and about half an inch thick. It wiggles and jiggles and cuts way too readily. In short, I didn't like it while I was carving it. Additionally, I really didn't like printing with it! I think it is MasterCarve.

Rather than wasting more time carving up the rest of what I've got left, I think I'll spend my time trying to figure out what I did with my blank lino blocks!

So on to the stencil. I'd had the idea of doing the song title in a stencil. I was discouraged in this by two things. Firstly, when I tried to cut the first stencil, it just had too much area in the letters and not enough in the background to support them. Then I discovered that stencilling on top of the laser printed tie-dye was going to be a problem. I had to make 33 of these and I was tired of problems. So back to the logo. I used the original drawing of the logo to cut a stencil. I wasn't happy with it and determined that part of the problem was that my cutting skills were rusty. Part was that the original was distorted by having been covered with the pencil lead. Hmmm...

Back to the drawing board. I used my computer and my trusty CorelDraw X3 to simulate the logo, then printed out a few copies of the correct size onto a transparency. That turned out to be just right and I was able to cut a stencil I liked well enough to use on the sun shapes I'd laboriously cut from 90# and 140# CP Water Color paper and painted with yellow acrylics.

I used a pen to close up the ligatures that held the stencil pieces together and then painted Sunset Gold on the rays of the sun.

All You Need Is Love... And 17 Oz. of Glue!

Here's the other project that had me so up to my ears in glue that I was sick of gluing stuff. Luckily, I had scored an entire gallon of US ArtQuest's Matte Perfect Paper Adhesive for half price when one of my favorite paper arts stores (Las Vegas Art Stamps) went out of business. I got a ton of cool stuff there but I'd really rather that the store was still there. Linda is happily retired now though and she's so nice that you can't really complain. She deserves it and she still looks too young to be retired which will be a nice thing for her to have people to remark on to her.

The project was for BookArtz (my favorite Yahoo group, now co-located on the ning social network at http://www.bookartz.com/), the songbook hostessed by lovely Lyn in Michigan (right under the thumb on the mitten, if you're way familiar with Michiganders). Now I'd been way involved in the preliminary discussions of this fat book idea, and had had a very firm idea of the song I meant to do from the beginning. What else could I do but my very own theme song, Love Shack? I even paid to download the sheet music which I was surprised not to find for free online. (If you find it for free, don't tell me because that will just piss me off, okay?)

So even I don't know how it ended up being all about All You Need Is Love!

As you can see from the shape I tucked into the pocket on the front (yes, I know that I like pockets a lot), shades of Fool on the Hill and Here Comes the Sun crept in there. There was a bit of Sgt. Pepper in there too, as evidenced by the tie-dye background. It's mounted on purple card stock because it was printed on a color laser printer from a PDF and I forgot that they print out just a tad smaller than the original. I think I heard that somewhere before. Hmmm...

I got sick of gluing because I had to glue the top of the front to the cardstock but not the bottom. That had the transparency with the words glued to it. I'd originally thought to do the words with a stencil but there was too much letters and too little background to make a good stencil. The back is stamped with commercial stamps. 'Love' is a bought stamp, wood-mounted. 'Is All You Need' was made up with some of my favorite clear alphabet stamps on an acrylic mount.

More on stamps and stencils in the next post!