This is my latest page in the art journal I’m sharing with my sister.  I used copies of the notes I took at Clarion for the background, and the brown paper are tea-stained scraps of two short stories I wrote. 

The title of the piece is Rewriting: An Armful of Tomatoes.  My analogy is that carrying an armful of tomatoes is like trying to write a good second draft; how do you get more without losing what you’ve got?

The fox is drawn in colored pencil. Why a fox?  I like foxes, and they’re easy to draw. 

Here’s what I did with the tomato sketch I drew yesterday.

I hope to add color with some markers, but I have to wait for the block printing ink to dry.  Look for pear and pepper linocuts in a few days! 

I went grocery shopping today, and bought a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables.  The pluots are especially beautiful, but their speckled skin won’t work well as a lino cut. 

These sketches are going to eventually become lino cuts (three of them, anyway).

My sister and I have been working on a pair of Art Journals for over a year now.  I made some 140lb watercolor signatures, and we each created our own covers.  Then we’ve taken turns mailing the books back and forth to each other, so every other page is by the other person.  Here’s the most recent one I did.

For the background, I painted a forest scene in watercolor.

The profile is a linocut I made.  Actually, I first printed the linocut on the fabric itself, but it didn’t look right so I added the black-on-red print to cover it. 

The fabric is a swatch that a friend of mine used to cover a chair. 

The crown is cut out from some wrapping paper from my favorite store.  You can’t tell in the photo very well, but the crown has metallic gold highlights.

The buttons, which spell out ‘wicked queen’ were scrapbooking supplies that were on sale.  They’re lamentably short of ‘e’s, so if I use them again it will probably spell “sky turd” or something. 

This journal entry took me a lot longer than some of the other ones I did, not just because I painted an entire picture before covering it.  I fiddled with the composition for most of a week.

I had more fun with henna tonight and Friday night.  Some people volunteered to let me use their skin as canvases, though I didn’t remember to photograph all of it.  I’m afraid that the batch tonight was mislabled and contained some indigo, because it was unusually blue-green. :(  Either that or I added too much oil to the mix.  A little oil helps it flow better.  Too much and it drips and seeps.