In The Studio :: Terrie’s Book

The first book, other than my own, that I've worked in for the In The Studio Round Robin is Terrie Lightfoot's beautiful house-shaped book.  Since the whole idea behind this book is to explore source's of inspiration, I decided to explore how whim and whimsy could take the same idea and go different directions with it.

I started with three pages that I prepared identically.  Using pages from an old book, I cut out three blocks of old text and glued them onto each page.  From there, I left the pages out on my table, with no intentions about what to do or how to work on them.

As it happened, I worked on the pages serially, completing one, then moving on to the others.  I seemed to have a bit of trouble getting started with the first one.  It sat out for quite some time, with just the image of the girl on it.  I starred at it a lot, before it came together one Saturday morning.

It's an unusual division of visual space on a page for me, but I was happy with the colors and using the dry brush technique to create a little house for the girl to live in.  Best of all were these words from some of the text I had glued to the page that jumped out at me.

The next page happened one afternoon, when I was playing around with using rubber stamps to create a tone on tone background.  I could hear Ellie, fussing at her Dad and her brothers in the next room — some imagined breach of etiquette.  I wasn't sure whether to laugh or be embarassed.  She sounded just like me.  The phrase popped into my head and the page followed.  The tags are mica over bits of old paper, and they are tied onto the page with fragments of vintage lace.

The final page was actually started before the preceeding one, but only in the sense that I had dropped a piece of startling copper patina blue silk ribbon onto the page and knew it would be a blue and brown page.  I worked on it last.

For some reason I had difficulty scanning the full page, but I liked the scan of the bottom a lot.