Blue-Green Bird Book

This is one of the books whose cover-creation process I chronicled in an earlier post.  I finished up the green washes with blue acrylic printing, using commercially purchased rubber stamps. It feels a lot like cheating to use someone else’s art, but the commecrially produced rubber stamps are so convenient for so many techniques.

Once I’d begun to glue to the cover to the boards, but before I finished gluing the flaps to the inside, I sewed a line of green seed beeds along the edges of both covers.  Beading takes more time than virtually any other technique, but when you’re writing in a book, or thinking about what to write, it’s nice to have something tangible to play with.

For the inside end papers, I got my kids to show me a technique they’d learned in their Tempe Arts Block classes they took this summer.  This is a very traditional style of end paper, though I believe that originally they were done with oil or alcohol based paints on a layer of water. We used food coloring on a layer of shaving cream.  You don’t wash the shaving cream off, you just scrape it, so the paper has a faint oily sheen to it.

Apologies for the formatting errors on the earlier posts.  My husband just updated my site for me, and it appears there’s a technical glitch.