Getting Ready For Serenbe

I’m slowly getting ready for the art retreat at Serenbe this weekend.  My Memento Book pages are done, so I thought I would share a few of them.  They are all originals, front and back, but with a consistent theme.  I think they look a lot better in real life, since my new scanner and I are still not all that good of friends, but I’m happy with the pages.

Here they are in progress.  After the background was painted on a large sheet of watercolor paper, I cut it up into 5.5" pages.  I laid it out and started playing.  I really had no ideas about where this was going.

While I was looking at the squares, the phrase "art is where my heart is" popped into my head.  I decided I needed big hearts.  I used some pages from an old ledger I have.  The pages are funny — they have a sort of blue tint and don’t really look old although the handwriting is beautiful and spidery.  I cut out free hand hearts and then doctored them with moonshadow inks and some splatters of white paint.

This is the difference between the original pages (the white/blue cast) and the more sepia tones after I tinted the hearts.

With the hearts in place, I pulled out the file with my favorite transparencies in it, some vintage images from Paper Whimsy.  I cut a few out roughly and put them down to see how they worked.

They seemed to have the right feel, so I hunted through my transparency sheets to find an image for each of the 11 pages I was making.  I decided to overstamp the backgrounds with white text, stamped randomly.  I also added a stamped bee in the left hand-corner of the heart (for Serenbe).

A little lace went onto the bottom of each page and I added tags with my original thought, "art is where my heart is."  I’m hoping the tag will peek out from the edge of the book just a bit.

Here are a few of the final pages, including the back.