Journal #3 Spread 12... the last...

These are the last pages in the book... I had a hard time getting started and now I am having a hard time letting it go, but I liked these pages too, so all in all, though there were moments when I HATED this book, it has a nice feel to it. These two pages had some things to deal with....

I added color and edges to the face and left it be, although I have added some pretend writing along the edge.  I am playing with that right now.  Things that look like letters and words but are not.... something I was reading the other day called it Asemic Writing. I looked it up in Wikipedia. I am intrigued with it and I liked it sitting there opposite the house I transferred to some circular graph paper I found in the trash somewhere.   Underneath it is part of a poem by Louise Gluck that is one of my all time favorites. 

It is called A Myth of Devotion and is about Persephone and Hades, one of those stories I love. The quote on the page is the beginning....

"When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added."

Read it, it is an amazing poem.

Next week or the week after I will photo the last of the four books I made from failed prints before I start working in the last one and SOMEHOW I will start again.  Starting is the hardest part for me, and it lasts until about half the spreads are going somewhere.  So I am going to try not to be too cranky for the next month or so while I learn how to START!!!

Journal #3 Spread 11

This is the last spread with a small page in it in this book.  There wasn't much of anything on these pages to start with, but just to be consistant:

Someone gave me a DreamCatcher and I used it to make the mandala shapes on these pages, I also used more of the black paper with the gold acrylic and more tape.  The photo on the little page is from the A Train 79th street station in Manhattan..

 More Mandala, more Australian paper, some asparagus stalks and a totally failed transfer of the Manhattan skyline in the fog that I liked SO much better as it was when it didn't work than I would have if it had been pristine that I tore it some more and left it.   Some word tape also.  I just left it as I liked it.  I am not sure about the little person picture on the small page, but it is there and I have to let go of this book so it is staying.

Journal #3 Spread 11

This one came together fast, and I like the quiet nature of it..
Started out like this:

and nothing on the page stayed except what you can see through the transfers on the left side.  You have seen the eye before, I changed the scale and played with it a bit and the bottom is a building that was being renovated on 57th Street and maybe 8th Ave. several years ago.  Everything had been painted white, even the workman's chair was white, and the shadows were just lovely.  I took several pictures through the window and the workman came out to see what I was interested in.  He kindly let me inside to take some more because I was getting glare in the windows ...

The right side is a photo I have been using for ages as well as some black paper with gold and other acrylics on it and the bottom is some souvenir paper from a notepad I bought in Australia many years ago. It reappeared when I was going through a box of paper and I loved the effect of the turtles underwater.   

Journal #3, Spread 10

These were the last pages I got done, and actually I only finished one today, which means there may be other things that happen tomorrow or the next day but since I am going through the book sequentially, here they are:

They started out like this:

There was really not much to start with and for whatever reason the left side of the spread took forever to come even close to done. The image on the left is a photo I took in London around Christmas easily 10 or more years ago.  In those days I was getting 4 by 6 prints on glossy paper as the output, so I started with one of those and sanded it.  I then used a cold wax on it and the fire-like spots were where I ended up.  The rest of this side is striped wallpaper and bits of tape transferred words.  

The right side came together pretty quickly because of a donation from a friend.  One of my friends is blind and although she doesn't know Braille her husband does and they get a lot of advertisements etc in Braille.  I asked her to save me something so I could play with it and this is the first page of a calendar.  I used the little boy whom you have already seen and transferred him with gel medium.  The Braille on the right of the page is still "readable" but once the transfer went on the letters on the left compressed.  I did some shading on both sides of the page and then used a pen to make other Braille-like letters on the small insert page over one of my burned page experiments.

Lots of tape and some paint and done.  I liked the effect of the little boy transfer but I am trying to work out a way to keep the Braille readable while putting an image on top.  I have a dozen or so paged from the calendar to play with so at some point I'll try again.

Journal #3, Spread 8 and Spread 9

This one was of the incompletes, but I thought I would load it anyway just to keep things orderly.

And then I had an inspiration and now I have a finished spread, or at least as much of a finished spread as I get til more ideas appear. The right side was done when I loaded this picture, but I knew there was something out there somewhere for the left. And I found it in an old copy of the NY Times Magazine.  I rarely use other peoples items unless I change them majorly and this is no exception.  The "sparkles" were background for something and the window was background for a furniture ad.

Honestly the Magazine should have been thrown out long ago, since it was from 2014, but it was on my desk because there was a story I wanted to read. I finally read it and the "sparkles" caught my eye.  And there were a bunch of different windows but this one worked so well!

Spread 8 is another transfer with some drawing added.  This is the house where my parents had an apartment when I was born.  We lived mostly in the back on two floors and I lived there until I was about 7....

I don't think the little flap is done, but the failed transfer on the right got worked over with brushpen and will probably stay as is..

This is spread 9...

This one changed a bit also, though the squares on the left need something I am sure it will appear..

Journal #3 Spread 7

This started out with a not great transfer.  I thought perhaps I would just scrape it off, I have done that before with Gel Medium Transfers because they can have a plastic texture that lets you peel things away.  However I decided to just stick with it and see where it went.. It started with these pages:

The page on the left was, I think, handmade paper, and it was really heavily textured, which was probably why the transfer went so badly.

Center of the book, and you can see the stamp was pretty oddly "centered" on the page.. or not...

Seems centering on the little pages was not exactly one of my strengths..

 So, transfer on the left, piece of a printout on the right.

The center spread has a bit of stamping, a bit of drawing, a bit of collage and some odd striping, 

A bit of orchid petals, some printout, some striping, some tape transfer, some stamping, some old stamps and that white piece is paint that got pulled up from the windowsill in my living room when the AC leaked and the paint came loose from the  metal frame.  Hoarding strikes again, though I didn't keep it long, the leak only occurred last October...  It has great texture..

Journal #3 Spread 6

When I first loaded this spread, I was sure was not done, but I decided to put it in anyway.  I tore a picture out of the Times a couple of weeks ago which was a pic of John Kerry looking out the window of a hotel when he was working on the Iran Nuclear Agreement. I came across it and all of a sudden I knew what to do with it.  I wanted to tone down the white on the left side, but I always do it with buff gesso and/or watercolor so I was looking for new things to try.

Yes, her feet hang off the bottom of the page.  I left them. and this was the step I was looking for:

For me, the Hotel Rivage made all the difference!

Journal #3 Spread 5

This is another spread with a little page in the middle.  I think the next time I bind one of these books I will make sure that the little pages don't all go exactly in the middle of the book.  I think it would be fun to deal with them in different orientations..

 I always struggle with the stamped pages with the divided rectangles on them.  Sometimes I obliterate them, but with the striped wallpaper on these pages I sort of incorporated them.

I found the little boy on the right in a flea market years ago.  He was a glass negative that I scanned and inverted.  I have used him before, and probably will again, actually, he appears again in this book later on. When I get addicted to an image you will see a lot of it.

Journal #3 Spread 4

I have posted pictures of part of these pages before, mostly because I decided to try to set some of it on fire..  I like it in the overall scheme of these pages, and I did something else fiery later on, but who knows.. It is not likely to become my run at it technique but I am still a bit intrigued..
Before:

I am going to show you two versions of the left page.  I was not sure that it was done when I started photographing the book and it just sat there, so I set it on fire.  It is a transfer of one of my photos and just filling up the whole page was not what I initially had in mind.  First photo looked like this:

Post burning....

I won't burn the whole book, but it helped in my eye here.  

journal # 3 Spread 3 revisited

Between posting this page yesterday and today, something happened.  I set it on fire.  Actually I burned away part of it because I wanted to burn the next page, which I will show later... but I thought since spread 3 is the back side of spread 4 I would show what I did here.....

This was before....

and after.....

definitely a positive move, and later I will show what the burning did to the next spread...

Journal #3 Page spread 3

This spread cam together only recently.  I don't work on pages in order, something has to get to my eye on a specific day and this spread hung about for quite a while....

The left side was the toe part of a cowboy boot, and it just would not lie down and be quiet, so eventually I got rid of it totally.  I think that was the problem with the page originally.  I just could not NOT see the boot.  This one needs to be embiggened to get the textbased graphics, I think.  Also, the camera makes the bridge bottom and the lighthouse look more patchworky than the eye does, They are more solid when you see the real page..

Second page spread in Journal #3

When Journal #3 got sewn together, this was the "spread". It included one of the little randomly bound in stamped pages, so the little page flips from side to side.  Looked like this:

Now they look like this.  

The paper that made up the pages of this journal separated at the sewn spot more than any of the others so far.  I think I used more gel media transfers in this book and taking the paper off the transfer involves more water than I usually use.  SO I added a lot of striped strips that run through the pages and help to hold them together.  This was a tactic I hadn't used before but I liked it as it added elements to pages that had to be worked into the next design.

I have a lot of old wallpaper samples that were gifted to me by a friend.  I've probably had them 5 or 6 years and suddenly I am using them everywhere.  Hoarders Unite :-)

I have been working on the new "book"

since last I posted here.  And now I am thinking I will show you some before and afters.  I wish they would fix Picasa so that you could load your pics straight out of there to Blogger.  Seems they COULD do that.. heaven knows they are tight enough in other ways.  but no hope it seems.  It has been broken for ages and ages.  If they are not going to fix it, why, in one of their updates don't they take the button away?  OK, enough already... FIX IT!!!!

Several months ago, February actually, I posted a couple of pics of how the newest journal looked before being touched.  I called it leftover journal #3 when I started. Anybody who is new here, I make journals out of prints that didn't go quite where I wanted them to go and other random pieces of paper. This is what the first pages looked like when I sewed the book together:

 I had a time dealing with all the stuff on the right side and eventually just worked over it.  These pages have been lots of things but I think they are done now. The photo is from a building I pass with the dogs when I am walking them.  The reflections in it are always interesting.

The book page is from Jane Eyre, as is the tape text on the right side.  I like rubbing tape onto an old book page and then pulling it away so most of the page stays and the text comes up with the tape. You will see that trick again ...

So this is how the journal #3 opens as of May 7, 2015.