The name of this book came from the epoxy sticker on the front. My friend sent it to me from Japan, home of the most wonderful stationary stores I’ve ever seen. She sent it in the year of the pig, a few years ago, and I couldn’t bear to part with it, so I put it in my card catalog of reusable junk.

For the cover, I started with a piece of striped cotton, which I pasted a sheet of joss paper onto, much like the grackle book. Since I already had the wings silkscreen out and the gold and interference paints ready, I silkscreened a pair of golden wings onto the cloth, then got out my commercial stamps and pasted the yellow lanterns here and there for a focal point.  I tried to stamp the gold on the joss paper too, but the effect is so subtle that I can’t even make out the design.

I also used my swallow linoblock (which makes frequent appearances in my art) and made a red swallow right across the cover.  Once that was done, I was ready to glue the cover onto the book, and then I used origami paper with kimono designs for the endpapers. Only after all that was fastened securely to the book did I glue the face onto it. The face is made of polymer clay (gold clay) and I used a commercially purchased press mold. I made a bunch of them and had them lying around for when I happened to need a focal point for a book.

I made some new books, on account of it was a certain person’s birthday and she didn’t have any of my little books yet. So I made covers for the last three book blanks I had. This is my favorite of the three. I started with some simple cotton cloth from a placemat. I pasted it to a piece of paper, and then layered over a piece of joss paper. Joss paper is nice for collage because it’s quite thin, and because the inks are not colorfast, so you get some interesting bleeding.

I wanted to do some linoblock prints, so I mixed up some red acrylic and did the print of the grackle over the joss paper. I then used the rubber stamp of the music score.  At this point, it was so boring, it looked like my throwaway cover. It needed a little more chaos, so after I used gold and metallic and interference paints on my other covers, I rolled the excess paint right over the top.

Once I’d had these layers, I was happy with how it looked conceptually, and now it just needed a tactile 3D element to draw it together. I decided to use one of the brass charms, because it had been long enough since I last used it that I’d forgotten what a pain in the ass they are. You glue the circle to the brass, then wait for the glue to dry a bit, and then you put the epoxy sticker over the top. At this point, the epoxy sticker immediately curls up at the edges enough to pull your background paper right off, and then you have to glue the whole thing down and weight it, sometimes more than once.

I’d gone with a brass, copper, gold color theme, so I decided to do grommets along the spine. As you can see in the second photo, I sewed along them with thin red and copper wire. I think that’s my favorite part of this book.  I sewed the charm on the cover with red embroidery floss, and finished the inside by using blue art paper with Chinese clouds on it.

Of the three books I made this time, I was sure this one would be my favorite. I started with some cloth that I like very much, and then I got out some of my expensive interference acrylics and my wings silkscreen and made a pair of shimmery wings across it. I added other Victoriana images: the keys and the urns.

I had already decided that I wanted something moveable, and I had in mind that I would use some gear charms I bought for probably too much money. Then I realized that not all the gears had holes in the middle that were the right sort to allow them to rotate. I had a pack of this metal tape that they use for repairing ductwork, and I have a metal embossing set, so instead I decided to emboss the gears and some clockfaces (also too much money at the craft store). They emboss pretty well. When I was done, I touched them with alcohol based inks, which have a lovely random watercolor-hue.  The cool thing about this metal tape is that it’s TAPE, so when they were done, I stuck them right on the cloth. I used the spinners in the middle of the clocks as my moveable element.

The end papers are gold-brown and black abstract art from 7 gypsies.

This is the first mockup for the cover of my novel, SEEING THINGS, which will be epublished later this summer.  To start with, I used the painted background which I made using acrylic, stamps, and layers of black gesso.  After photographing it, I scanned it and then played with the color to get a brighter red (since my acrylics are cheap and have more of a red-iron-oxide hue.)

I knew I wanted some textural background, so I wrote out a note from the novel in copperplate script on a piece of parchment with a dip pen. I also drew some images from an old book on witchcraft I have. I combined both of them with the photograph I did of titan buff and gesso on watercolor paper.

I think that if I were to do it again, I’d skip the titan buff colored texture. I wanted to have something close to the model’s skin color to mesh together so that her skin had a texture to it, but the problem is that I had a hard time not making it lighten up the red background I’d spent so long making. Once I’m more proficient in Gimp, I think I’ll be able to figure it out. Somehow I managed to do the cool masking/transparency thing with the text so that where I’d written in black, it showed up clearer and lighter. I’m not sure how I did that, but I’m keeping it.

To get the model’s skin to look like that, I moved the image to Microsoft Photo editor and used their effects tab “watercolor” feature twice.  I think I’d rather just do it once, but microsoft photo editor doesn’t have the same depth of “undo” that gimp has.

What kind of book do you think this cover is for?

These are three paintings/collages I did to use as the background images for my cover art. The red one will be for my first novel, SEEING THINGS, which will be out on Smashwords and Kindle by September 1st of this year.  The green will be its sequel, TREEMAKER and the blue will be for the third in the series, DAYRUNNER.

I started by using texture plates to print with black gesso on the sheet of watercolor. I brushed black gesso around the edges too, so that it would fade into the center.  A crow figures into the plot of the second one (and I like crows) so I painted a crow in gesso.  After it was dry, I painted over with a wash in the dominant color. Using a rag, I rolled some of the paint off. You can especially see this in the blue one. When this dried, I did a third layer of color, thinning it so I had no white spots.  I also used some of the paint to do more textural prints on top of that.

These may not look like much, but they have a very specific function, and I think they turned out exactly as I wanted them to.

One interesting (in an annoying sort of way) is how yellow the cabinet behind the blue painting looks in this image. I think that’s the camera’s auto-correct function.  All of these were done in the same lighting and at the same time.

I think I like this best of the books in the rainbow series.  It’s predominantly red, which is one of my favorite colors, so that’s part of it.

This was one of the first ones I finished, so I wasn’t terribly concerned about making it that different.  I decided to just go with the background as is, and use a strong design as a focal point. This is a commercially purchased stamp that I like quite a bit. I think I like it in part because it resembles the weed-motif I used on the dark clay cups I made last year (inspired by a photo I took in Missouri.)

On the back you can see part of the writing (commercially purchased stamp) and the crows with the basketweave border (linoblock I cut years ago.)

Inspired by the previous book in the rainbow series, I decided I wanted to do some more lettering.  It used to be that people who painted signs and drew ads had to paint the letters and numbers by hand, and they had to use both precision and creativity in designing their own fonts.  I wanted to use a Roman font for this, and I wanted something simple enough that I could showcase each letter without overwhelming the overall design with a too-understandable word.  So I chose my lucky number, in Roman numerals.  Half of it is cut off, but that doesn’t matter. You don’t need to know what my lucky number is.

For the background, after I finished masking and washing with color, I needed some way to tone it down. The other books came out so colorful that I was having trouble differentiating them.  So I used a toothbrush and some black acrylic paint, and splattered it.  To me, it looks a little like something out of the eighties. I seem to remember that splattered look being popular.

I used a sharpie paint marker for the letters. I’m not sure I quite like the sharpie paint markers.  They’re fussy, and not as opaque as I’d like, so I’m not sure they’re more accurate than a brush and some paint or gesso.  I have them now though, so I ought to use them.

This was another one of the rainbow series books, so-called because of the rainbow look of the tie-dyed/marble technique fabric I used for the base.  After the layers of masking tape and washes, I had blocks of color, which I added stamps to.  This one has silver rub-and-buff as accents.

I wanted to try some calligraphy techniques, but I don’t like the way that text can dominate a piece of art, for example when people do collage art that has words like “believe” or “family” or “good times”. It seems kitschy and scrapbook-y to me.  So I asked my friend, Latin teacher and fellow Clarionite Betsy Hasman, for some texts I could use. She gave me this, one of her favorites. I think it’s Cicero.  I drew pencil lines, then chose a font and began to copy from the printout. I don’t understand it at all, and since it’s layered on top of itself, you probably can’t either.

I wanted a focal point on the cover, so I used a framing stamp and some embossing powder. The stamp, however, has too fine of a detail to show well with the embossing powder, and more to the point, I didn’t have anything to go inside. So I cut out a piece of dyed paper towel, then split it and glued it to the center.  I’ve used layers of dyed paper towels to good effect before.

This time, it didn’t seem to do the trick.  More detail, I figured, more stamps. I used the black wings, and then added a smaller silver stamp under it.  I don’t know if I made it better, but I figured I’d done enough. The calligraphy is pretty cool, after all.

This was one of the series of books I made with the tie-dyed/marbling technique cloth as a base. You can see the faint impression of some of the collage background papers, for example, the joss paper.

After I had the rainbow tie-dyed/marbled cloth with the colored paper back, I laid strips of masking tape over it and began to layer colored washes. Since I did this for all six of the rainbow series book covers, they all kind of look similar.  I used my linoblocks of birds to put some detail, and when that proved insufficient, I used black acrylic ink and my commercially purchased stamps.  For this one, I finished by adding some coins that I had purchased in bulk a few years ago to make belly-dancing costumes (before I stopped belly dancing.)

This was actually a book cover that I had started this spring, but had to leave unfinished on the shelf because I ran out of book blanks.  Once I made more book blanks, I got it out to finish up.

I started with a printed calico, which I washed over with violet and black.  You can see the print of gesso that’s fainter (the florentine design) where the wash didn’t take.  I used some bird stamps with interference acrylics, and when I got out the black acrylic paint to print the musical staff, I put some on this as well.

I had a color theme, and knew I wanted to use the bronze charm (which I also used on a previous book) but I didn’t know what should go in the center of the charm, so I cut a circle out of the selvage and used that.  The color matched.  I added the grommets, beads, and brads for texture, then sewed the charm on and glued it to the book blank. When it was finished, I rubbed oil-based rub-n-buff on the cover and especially around the sides to continue the color theme.