Ziggy zaggy

This week I have been playing with some more with concertina or zigzag books!

I had previously made some monoprints on mixed media paper so that I could make books. Here's the pile of prints and left over collage bits.

I used my own poem A Poetic Conundrum on this one.

I made this into a beach themed book and used words from a scrapbook paper pad

This third one used the words of another of my poems

You can read the poems on this post: Oh my word!

Thanks for joining me today.

Happy Easter

Bernice

More concertina

In my last post I showed you the beginning of a new concertina book.

I decided to use the theme of Florida rather than just do abstract painting.  I used some paper napkins I had bought in Florida many years ago and glued them onto the pages.

I worked on the book 4 pages at a time and then opened it up to see what it looked like.

I forgot to take a photo of the first four pages so I have had to crop it from the photo above.

Then I started adding layers of thinned down transparent acrylic paint.

I did the same with each of the sets of 4 pages.

When I had finished all four sets of 4 pages I again opened up the paper to see what it looked like.

Now it's all dry I shall go back to it and add more layers with pens and crayons.  And possibly some more collage papers.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

A new concertina

This week with the Free Up Your Sketchbook course we are reviewing, researching and preparing.  So I reviewed my sketchbook and there are bits I like but it's all too dark.  Karen did an interview with Debbie Mackinnon where Debbie showed the small concertina books that she makes.

Which gave me an idea!

I suspect Debbie starts with an A1 sheet of paper.  The largest I have is A2 so that's what I used.  Rather than making the book first, I started by putting pieces of masking tape on the paper, drawing lines with a grey Stabilo crayon and then scraping gesso on.  It was all very random.

When the gesso had dried I added very watered down turquoise and copper acrylic inks.

And when that was dry I added bits of collage using Gel medium as the glue.

Then I folded the paper and cut it. You can watch this video if you want to make one yourself.  I folded up the paper which makes a concertina book that is A6 size or opened out to A5 as in these photos.

Some of these double pages are lovely already.  However I will still add more layers to all of them.

Doing the mark making before the folding has meant that I have much more random layouts.  I would probably have put more effort into thinking about placement if I'd made the book first.

AND I am back in my comfort zone with the limited palette.

I'll continue to photograph my journey in this sketchbook.  Watch this space!

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice