All caught up!

Yikes! We'll be all caught up by the end of this post, unless I wake up in the middle of the night and write something, which seems bloody unlikely...

Note the decorative paper - it's actually two strips, pasted side by side, of a paper I covered a little book with earlier this week... I'll post some pics of it at the end - that is actually a wrapping paper, I think. Not a traditional 'decorative paper' by any means, but really pretty.

Page 29 was written at a club in the dark, just in case you're wondering about the sloppiness. I have to do that frequently, write and draw in the dark. It's kinda fun, actually, like when you play Cranium and have to draw things with your eyes closed! My family plays Cranium when we go to the beach. I'm pretty good at drawing things with my eyes closed. My family is even pretty good at guessing what they are! It's the Humdingers that are our downfall with that game. We never know any of the songs, so we all submit songs that we do know and might possibly be able to hum to chose from instead.

This is one of my favorite recent pages. It's got drawings. Heck, it's got drawings that are talking! And it has another of my favorite things for journals: an autograph. Admittedly, it's an illegible autograph, so I had to write the guy's name over it so we'd all know who it was. I spelled his name wrong - it's Rafe Stefanini - so I'll have to write about THAT in my journaling tomorrow!

Oh yeah, the little bookie wookie pictures I promised!

It's got another one of those beaded headbands, and the white leather is actually vellum.

Yet again...

Here are the next batch....

Now you might just wonder why someone would 'celebrate' their 25th anniversary with someone they are no longer married to. And you might wonder why someone lets their ex sleep in their guest bedroom.  (He likes to say it's on the couch, but, really, he has his own room.) I'm wonder myself at times. Of course, when you marry someone, you marry their whole family, and the short answer is that I'm still married to the family. (The shorter answer is that I'm nuts.)

 

And finally, because, frankly these pages have been a bit boring, one with some art on it...

 

...which takes us up to the beginning of this week. I should note that the color in the illustrations is from Prismacolors. I neglected to mention these in the list of art supplies yesterday, but I use them a lot. They're what I color the center of the shadow nib lettering with, among other things.

 

More pages...

Here's the next batch of images from the current journal, Four of a Kind. I've had some queries about what media I'm using. I write normally with a Lamy fountain pen, (they come in other colors, too). I fill the cartridges with Noodler's Black ink, thanks to my friend, Roz, for recommending that! I am a total sucker for fountain pens, but I have to use one that can take waterproof ink. I've found that broader nibs are less likely to clog, so I use at least a medium nib. Other than that, I use Peerless Watercolors (thank you, Ricë, for sending me some), Neocolor II crayons by Caran d'Ache, and occasionally wax crayons of various sorts... Plus all kinds of markers, (Zig Memory Calligraphy Markers and Pentel Colorbrush markers) and other stuff on and off.

Ahh, here's a page with some photos printed out - onto a commercial printing paper: Fortuna Matte 80# text. One shows me doing page 7, and the other the progress of the sunset, which continues on...

...page 11. It's kind of hard to see, but on the upper right of page image you can barely see some white tabs. They're what are holding in the business cards... This is how I keep track of people and stuff. It's not a great way, really, because I have to remember when I met the people, but that just sends me down memory lane looking through old journals. On the St Patrick's pages, you can see the Neocolors being used to add the color to the margin area. I love these kinds of color schmears... Even if you can't draw, you can play with color...







 

 More Neocolor stuff here, like the illustration of my foot in the sandal, and just above it, the tab for holding the business card...

The Neocolors do smear, as you can see on page 12. You can fix them with Crystal Clear from Krylon, but probably some other less toxic pastel fixatives would work as well. I like the Crystal Clear 'cos it makes stuff shiny and that makes the colors 'pop' out, but it's stinky and gives some people a tremendous headache!

Four of a Kind... Pages

I thot I'd try posting pages from my journal for awhile, since some people seem to find them interesting. They may find it less interesting if I post more, because, frankly I tend to publish only the pages that seem interesting, and now you'll get all the pages and they may seem boring. But, hey, I can stop anytime. So here goes!

I've just started a new journal, as you know. Here are the first few pages...

 

So, there you go... Three and a half images. I scanned them at slightly different resolutions. Some people like to just get the general look of things, others want to read the journal closely. 

I'll figure it out!

Ephemera...

I love ephemera! All those weird little things that one finds on the street or just in the course of everyday living... Stamps, playing cards, business cards, photos, tea envelopes, chocolate wrappers, theater tickets, flyers... The list is endless!

Over the years it's all found its way into my journals and has caused the 'V' effect I mention in Saturday's posting about Transformer... The way I get around this in my hand bound journals is to bind in a waste signature of a single folded sheet of cover stock every other signature. I use cover stock cut to the same sheet size as my regular pages, but when I come to them, I cut them out. They hold space at the spine of the book for all the stuff I paste in. Here's one from Crazily Paisley:

You can see the ephemera: a card, a tea envelope, and, tucked into it, a chocolate wrapper from a Bliss chocolate. Here's a side view:

This is just cheap card stock. The one here is an off-white because that's what I had on hand when I bound the book. Since the paper I use, Schiller, is a white-white, I usually try to use white cover stock, but sometimes I'm in a hurry to bind a journal and the paper store isn't open.

Another thing to notice is what's holding the playing card into the book: it's an address label. I carry a bunch of these in the back pocket/envelope in my book, so I can stick stuff into the book right away and not have it fall out. If I think I want to attach it in some other way, I'll put it in the pocket/envelope until I get home and have time to deal with it. Here's a picture of the pocket from Four of a Kind:

When I print the endsheets, like I did for this journal, it's easy to make the pocket match the papers... You just print another and cut the pocket/envelope out of that.

These latest bindings all have either eight or nine signatures of paper pages - four sheets to a signature... Which, when folded and thought of front and back, mean sixteen pages to a signature. Right now a journal this size is lasting me a bit over two months. My old, larger journals usually lasted for six months or more! Looks like I'm going to need to build more shelves to house all these guys!

A few pages from Flying Cloud...

Roz wrote a comment about wanting to see more of the inside pages of my journal. Most of them are visually fairly boring, I think... A tidge of calligraphy, a spot of color, but mostly blah blah about my life and the universe. Here is a fairly typical page:

I always get excited about sunshine. I like numbers. I write about other people's lives as well as my own... Sometimes carefully, in code, but not usually, so I have to block the names out here.

I don't normally use background color on my pages, but Ricë gave me some Peerless Water Colors a few years back and I love their saturation and purity. While we were having some dreary days, I painted several pages to give myself some color. Here are ten pages in a row:

 

 I write about dreams frequently, if the imagery interests me...

I love japonica and one of the colors in the Peerless set is Japonica Red... Hence my feeble attempts to draw a japonica blossom.

White Flower Oil, mentioned in the pages above is a Chinese analgesic balm that saved my body this winter. I tore my rotator cuff (muscle only!) on the tree lot this year, and it helped get me over the pain....

 Ricë and I talk on the phone about all sorts of things. We noted that the sun rises later in Midland than it does here in Austin. They are way west and a bit north of us, which accounts for that, but we had fun trying to be mathematical and figure out what was due to what...

There's a lot of discussion about money in these pages. That's mostly because it was tax time - property and state sales tax - and I had to come up with a chunk of change.

Here's another page with some typical illustrations for my journal in general...

 

You can't really tell it from the picture but the little swirls and the centers of the letters have marks done with glitter pens. I'm sure if medieval monks had had glitter pens available, they would have used them. They are just plain fun...

ps. I like glitter crayons, too!

The last three journals...

The last three journals: Crazily Paisley, Flying Cloud, Four of a Kind...

OK, so it's been forever since I've posted. Forever enough that I've got three journals you haven't seen. These are a new thing for me, in a way, yet in another way, they're a very old thing... They are small journals, bound with artists canvas, much like the journal that got me started into bookbinding... Transformer, from 1993. This journal...

The very plain Transformer, which never got painted...

I bought it at Whole Foods and loved it... I never painted it, though, and it started to come out of its covers after being carried in my backpack for seven months. These photos show some of the damage:

The one on the left shows the split at the hinge. The reason it split is visible in the next photo... I pack too much ephemera into my journals, which causes that 'V' effect. It's kind of like your journal has gained ten pounds and it's still trying to fit into its favorite shirt, its cover... Because I still like to paste ephemera into my journals, I now make journals to accommodate the extra 'weight.'

Here's the first of the new journals. They're all split-board bindings. The covers are all painted before the boards are covered.

Crazily Paisley!

This was an experiment in using day glow paints, which is why the book is glowing. I airbrushed the background, the green part. The endsheets are also day glow, just stripes painted on paper.

Rear endsheet, showing pocket....

Endsheets of Flying Cloud, that's her, the clipper ship.

The next journal was Flying Cloud... I've always loved clouds... My Dad and I used to stop when we saw a really cool cloud when I was a kid. More recently, when we went to the beach, we stayed at a house that had a set of coffee mugs with pictures of clipper ships on them, among them the Cutty Sark and Flying Cloud. Flying Cloud was the fastest clipper ship in her day, and held the speed record for traveling from New York City to San Francisco for 136 years. Even more amazing was that the navigator on that record-breaking sail was a woman, Eleanor Creesy, wife of the Captain, Josiah Perkins Creesy.

My latest journal is Four of a Kind. I found a ten of hearts on the ground on one of my recent walks and got fascinated with doing images of cards. Ah ha, you're probably saying, there are only THREE cards on the cover. The fourth card is on the endsheets... I used a beaded headband on this cover. I think they're really lovely.

I'm really having fun with the hand painted covers. The journals are pretty tiny for me. I'm doing the pages nine out of sheets of Hahnemühle Schiller: each sheet is about 11 1/2 x 8 1/8 inches, more or less, so the page is half that. I have trouble writing in columns in these journals... But I do it anyway.

Pages from Flying Cloud...