Fox Laughs

This was another mistake that turned out well.  I started with a piece of canvas to which I applied gesso. I wanted a dark color, so I poured black acrylic on it and brushed it around, only to find that the black became grey. No good.  While the paint was still thick and wet, I took a linoblock I’d cut of a laughing fox and impressed it into the paint.  Not only did this texture the gesso, but it also took off the tint, leaving two white outlines of a laughing fox on the canvas. I put more black paint over it, but realized if I spread it in it would ruin the image, so I left it there.

The cover material sat on my table for several days while I tried to figure out what to do with it. I considered just sewing a bunch of beads over it, but decided that would be too much work for too little gain.  What it needed was color. I chose a few shades of tissue paper, and a sheet of orange-and-gold joss paper, and tore them into chunks.  I adhered them directly over the image, overlapping them to get a multicolored effect.  Then I didn’t know what to do, so I let it dry.

The next day I realized that the laughing fox image was barely visible, and that I wanted to mirror it by another print on top of the colored tissue paper background.  I’d learned while doing the Celadon Book that you can’t use acrylic and rubber stamp here with our low humidity, but when I added 50% acrylic gel retarder to the paint I was able to get multiple prints before the paint dried.  Not only did it dry much quicker than water based block printing ink, but as a bonus, it became impermeable when dry, unlike the block printing ink. (My red swallow prints all smeared when I painted over them with clear acrylic medium, no matter how long they’d been left to dry.)  The only bad part was that the image didn’t turn out as clear as I’d hoped. I tried to touch it up with a sharpie, but it didn’t look like a laughing fox anymore, it looked like a fox that had something wrong with its mouth.

The buttons with letters were left over from the package I bought and used with the ‘Wicked Queen’ page of my altered art journal.  Lucky for me, I had enough letters to spell out “Fox Laughs.”  The endpapers (not shown) are buff batik hearts on a black background, matching the whimsy of the cover.  Sort of Aesop carnival.