Books Reduction Lino Print - Finished!

I apologize for the delay posting this, I only just got back to work after Christmas break today, and as I don't have my own scanner, I had to wait. The colours are just much closer to real life when they're scanned instead of photographed. So here it is, finally finished! I'll admit, I was getting a little sick of it by this point, and I got a little more ink around the edges than usual, but the majority of my fingerprints and whatnot will be covered by the mat, assuming these get purchased and framed. The series went quite well, and the registration stayed perfect the entire time. I still have to go through them and see if there are any to discard because the ink didn't print well, but I think there will only be one I do that to. Awesome!

It's now available on Etsy. You can go buy it, or, if you'd rather just win one, leave a comment because I'm going to give one away. You have until Wednesday night, when I'll draw the winner!

Armillary Sphere - Last Two Colours

This was such an easy project, with only four colours total! Of course, I had to go and rush the third one, so I didn't get the registration right on a few because I was going too fast. grrrrrr. Oh well, I started with eight and will still have five or six good ones once I look over them to see how they turn out.

When I was mixing the last colour I discovered that the yellow ink actually has a fair bit of white in it, and made the black grey instead of turning it brownish. I ended up making it fairly purple in the end, which looked more like what my monitor did to the dark brown of the original colour separation I did when planning this.

I'm pretty happy about how it turned out. For the most part I cut everything where it's supposed to be, and I like the blue. It's still a learning print, but not too bad overall.

Laughing Kids - Finished!

 Well, I'm finally done school, and that gives me a whole lot of free time to start drawing again, and to get a few posts up! I finished this a couple of weeks ago, but haven't been very good about posting things. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. I think it has a lot of energy. Not to mention, I finally got everyone looking right, so that's a big bonus. It's been sent off and I hope will make someone very happy for Christmas.

Here's a couple close-ups of the faces:

Tep's Wedding Portrait - Ready for Framing

I'm very pleased with this and can't wait to get a frame. They're coming to visit for Thanksgiving, so I've got two weeks to get everything ready, which should be plenty! I wish it photographed a bit better, because it's reflecting a little on the whites, and washing out the colours in the darker areas. Nevertheless, I'm sure you get the idea. Can't wait to give it to her!

Beautiful Cousins - Suddenly it All Comes Together

I don't really like blaming my tools, because I think it's the last refuge of people who don't actually know what they're doing, but I didn't have a good white pastel, and I finally made the long walk to the art store, and got a couple hard pastels (white and dark brown, for details), and a nice white with just a tiny bit of yellow, to get the colour right.  I also got a few paper stumps to get the blending right, and help with the little details. I don't know if it was the new tools, or they just gave me a little more confidence, but on this layer everything just sort of fell into place.  The colour is much better and the portraits considerably more accurate. I'm going to give it a couple of days, then maybe go back in and touch things up.

A Snow Book - All finished and Just Perfect!

I'm so pleased with how this one turned out because I think it really takes advantage of the lovely materials I had to work with. It only opens just half past-way, so not truly a star book, but it works on this one.

Yet another type of white paper for the cover, but with a blue silk spine so that it's not too boring. I only had very thin white ribbon, so I put three on either side, with is just the detail it needed. Happy accident! Speaking of accident, there was a tiny bit of pen on the other side that ran when the glue got wet, opps! Good thing it's blue, so it's not so bad (I hope!). Anyway, you aren't supposed to look of the cover, you're supposed to put it on display:

Words & Letters - I like this one!

Sometimes things turn out even better than you had hoped. And this one is awesome! I'm really pleased to have something work out so well after the last book was nothing but an exercise in frustration.

The last step with this one was to put a last layer that was simply a frame for the rest. I wasn't sure if I should put it on, in case it made everything look too heavy and blocked the detail of the middle layer. But in the end it really sets everything off, and the details kind of appear as you look and move around the piece.

The cover. It made some antiqued paper using mostly ink and only a little coffee, so that it matched the old book and black paper.

Inside




Now, go buy it at my etsy shop.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven - all put together (well, almost)

So here we are, at the end of a very frustrating project. If you read my other posts about it, you know this already, but nothing seemed to go quite right on this one, and I'm glad I'm rid of it. Which is not really the attitude to have about these things, but still, it happens sometimes.

Here is the cover. I think I will end up changing this, or at least the ribbon, at some point. I had no idea what to do for it. I'm not a very good embroidered so I didn't really want to do that. It worked fine for "The Tell-Tale Heart" because that was supposed to be messy. But this should look nice. Also, it isn't seen when it's open, and will probably never be displayed closed, so I don't want anything elaborate. Leather would have been much too thick because it would be bulky when it closed. Any papers I tired looked bad against the fancy calligraphy. So I just went for some silk. Other than that... yeah, I have no idea what I really want here. Maybe I'll take it with me to the fabric store and see if I can find anything that doesn't look stupid with it.

With the embroidery on the edges. I used silk thread in grey and purple, in a sort of twisted chain stitch. It blends in and compliments and looks terrific all at the same time. At least one thing went right!

The cover when it's on display.

Yeah, I think I'm going to rip it off. In fact I know I will. I'm going to look for something in ivory and gold.

The Tell-Tale Heart - ok, I lied, but now it's really finished

Following a critique I got back of my Tell-Tell Heart I decided to listen to their very good advice, and try to antique the cover, as just didn't quite fit with the antiqued look of the inside pages. So I put some paint on it. Which not only added the needed age, but also brought out all the detail in the shapes! I love it!

The Tell-Tale Heart - and they lived happily ever after. The End.

All right folks, tell all your rich, American Lit loving friends. It's finally, totally, absolutely finished! It's destined for the Hotel Sask next week, but I'm putting it up on Etsy for the time being, so hurry and buy it right away!

I'm very ridiculously pleased with the cover. (This is a scan before I attached it so that you can see the whole thing). It's made of some nice thin recycled leather (bet this furniture scrap never anticipated its future life), embroidered with silk in the same shape as the inside title page, cut-out to exposed the binding, and then the front and back have plenty of raised designs under the leather to make it interesting.

I got the idea for the raised designs from this tutorial on Karleigh Jae's blog. I just took it a little further. I made it really really complicated with the amount of detail, the positive and negative shapes (some are embossed, some in relief), and then I put a few shapes on a second layer to top it all off.

This is the spine with open binding. Well, open binding is maybe not the right term, because I actually hid the binding. Originally I was going to have it exposed, which is why I made holes in the leather. However, I decided that the book was simply too small, it would be extremely crowded, and just a detail too much, so I hid it instead.

Another view of the cover. The 'E. A. Poe' was a bit of a last minute addition.

The inside pages. Looks great when they're all together!


The front and back endpages, in that terrific paper I found in blood-red that looks like it had veins running through it. Perfect! I really enjoyed doing these cut outs because I've gotten quite good at them, and because they are glued down I could add so much extra detail with some pieces floating unattached to the larger paper.

Another detail, and the one that caused me the most grief. I've been trying to find some nice, thin, black paper for a couple of months now, ever since I started, and nothing! Then I was at work (well, volunteering actually) at Ten Thousand Villages when I found a gift bag in black paper made of recycled silk. It was printed on, but there was enough blank spots in between to let me make a few little shapes and add them between the pages. Most of them are smaller than this one. It was really difficult to cut the paper and almost impossible to see what I was doing.


The binding I did with the same silk thread as the cover embroidery. In keeping with the feel of the entire book it's uneven and is in a different pattern in each signature.

The End.