26 of my "S" submission for the ABECEDARY
First of all - what is a ABECEDARY? It is a book with each page representing a letter of the alphabet. The Book Arts Roundtable is my book making group in New Jersey and our collaborative this year was an ABECEDARY. I was given the letter S and I was told to design a card and make 26 copies to swap with everyone else, each one, given a specific letter. In the end we would all get a deck of cards of the entire alphabet.
I decided to keep this as simple as possible. I did not want to labor at printing out all those cards, so much can go wrong when you are printed something out on a computer, so I wanted to do something artful.
So One afternoon I "painted" S curves with sumi ink. After painting the image I waited 5-10 seconds and washed it off in the sink. Sumi has lacquer in it and some of the edges dry black, while other parts wash off and just leaves gray. This was a lot of fun! I was playing music and found that I got bolder in my brush strokes when some Jazz came on.
But what to do on teh back side. It was pouring rain one day and I lit a candle and got the idea to burn the edges. This was a lot of fun and I just loved the edges! In fact, I got so into it, I scorched or sooted up the backs!
The picutre above is all of my 26 cards feathered out to see all the edges. This was photo'd before I handed them out.
Burning edges with a candle can be dangerous. I have found that using a punk (the long slow-burning stick that we use to light fire-crackers) works great. It will brown the edges without losing any of the art.
ReplyDeleteI love your books and other art!!