This is a present I made for Jane, whose birthday is tomorrow.  My camera isn’t here right now, so I had to photograph it using the scanner instead.  It would have scanned better if I had done it before gluing on the barette backing, but I think the detail came out well enough. 

This piece is small, about 1 1/2″ x 4″.  It’s made with tooled 4-5oz leather, painted with acrylic.  Before painting it, I used a dye wash over the whole thing in emerald green, so that I wouldn’t have any natural leather color showing through.  I deliberately left some of the green showing when I painted the copper background, for a verdigris look. Green oxide interference paint highlights the veins, nose, and eyes.

After the leather dried, I painted it with acrylic paint.  They do sell dyes for leather, but the guy at Tandy, who was perfectly willing to sell me hundreds of dollars of crap I don’t need, said that acrylic would work just fine.

I first painted the sun red, then painted over it with gold interference paint.  So now it looks gold directly, and red when you see it at an angle.  The moons and oak leaves also have interference paint.  Not shown, gold leaf stars on the spine. 

Here’s the cover I’m doing for my altered book.  I used a piece of vegetable cured leather, 4-5oz.  I wanted to have the look of cord-bound book, so I wrapped plastic over the book (to protect it from water) then wound it with twine.  I got the leather wet and stretched it over the twine to get that design. 

Since I put the water only on the spine, that’s the only part that really stretched. 

When that dried, I painted one side with water and tooled a design into it. 

When that dried, I did the same to the other side. 

Tomorrow, the painted version.

Mistakes I learned from:

When you cut into the leather, it leaves a narrow groove that the paint doesn’t want to go into.  I had the right idea of putting india ink into the groove, but it would have been better had I done that before painting the acrylic.

When I trimmed the leather to match the book, I hadn’t taken the plastic off.  This made the lines a little off, and the leather got cut too short on one side.

Altered Book 7 Altered Book 6 Altered Book 5 Altered book 4Altered book 2 Altered book 1I started a round-robin altered book project with three other artists.  Each of us chose a book and altered it in some way.  I chose to alter the structure, and cut windows through the pages. I used paste and scraps of paper to reinforce them.  I made swinging wooden doors for one of the windows, and glued a picture frame into another one.  I want to incorporate the lock, but I’m not sure how yet.

 I have a plan to tool a piece of leather and use it for the cover, but I don’t know if it will work or not.  It might be too thick.  Photographs of that to come.

For some reason, the photos uploader wouldn’t give me the ‘thumbnail’ option for this post.

This glass is made with amethyst frit and cobalt frit.  The cobalt turns an iridescent lavender when it’s incandescent hot.  It reminds me of the pinkish-lavender that some cobalt based underglazes have.    It’s hard to see the color in this light, because it’s so dark, but it’s intense dark blue with dots of violet.