Here’s another tile from my low-fire 2007 collection.  Another fact: Instead of rolling out the slabs, I pounded them with a wooden mallet, flattened on one side, that I got at a workshop by Junya Shao and Xiaoping Luo at the Vihel center in Tempe.  I find that if you pound the clay flat rather than rolling it, you get a nice density and less warpage.

This isn’t a very good photo, but it’s one from my old site that I saved for when I didn’t have anything new to post.  I’m working on two projects right now, a stained glass window panel, and a large mural.  I will post photos of them when they’re done.

This shrine was inspired by the Mexican folk art shrines that honor Maria de Guadalupe and other Catholic saints.  They’re usually bedecked with candles and marigolds and photos. I love the look, but I wanted something different.

I started with an old deck of Morgan Greer tarot cards.  It took me a while to decide to use one of them, because as a rule I generally don’t like to use anyone’s art except my own. (Kind of limiting for a collage artist, I know.)  I chose this card because it was pretty, and colorful, and female, without being too serious or religious.  I painted the back of the box red, figuring that if I chose a color I liked, everything else would follow along.  I painted the inside of the box red too.

At this point, I hadn’t yet decided if I was goign to use the door on this shrine or on the owl shrine.  I assembled the main box part, and painted it with a copper acrylic paint.  I painted the roof piece copper as well.  Still no ideas, so I mixed some violet acrylic paint and rolled it out so I could use a rubber stamp and give the box some texture.  Better, but still a little bland. 

By now I’d gotten far enough on the owl shrine to know that the door wouldn’t work on that one, so I started thinking about how to make the door suit this one.  I just got some sheets of copper, and I was dying to try them out, so I embossed the backside of a copper sheet and then folded it over the front of the door.  It didn’t cover the edges very well, but I had a roll of adhesive copper foil tape that I bought for use with stained glass work. I used more of this tape to cover the linen strips that serve as door hinges.

To finish the door, I went through my beads to find something that looked good as a door handle, and I painted the inside violet to complement the texture.  I’d found the magenta silk flower, and decided that looked good in the peak of the attic part, so I glued the roof on and stuffed the flower in there.

Flowers were a good theme, so I rummaged around until I found the poppy seed heads.  I’d grown these poppies last year from a package of poppy seeds I bought for making cakes and then never used.  They have very large heads.  I painted them different shades of red and purple, and two of them I leafed with red-gold leaf.  To prop them up, I used the plastic casing from a box of 22 ammo. The plastic wasn’t very pretty, so I wrapped it in magenta joss paper.  A little hot glue to put everything in place, and voila!

This is nine inches tall, six inches wide, and two inches deep.

I got a book called ‘Creating Personal Shrines’ by Carol Owen after Jane Cheek showed it to me.  (Jane and I tend to inspire each other.)  The focus of Carol Owen’s book was creating memory boxes based around family ancestors.  Like most contemporary collage, her work is heavy on vintage photos and “ephemera”.  Not my thing, but she includes patterns and instructions for creating the boxes.  It’s quite time consuming, in that you have to paint foam core board on both sides with acrylic medium, and after it’s dried, you have to wrap it in rice paper.  I tried newsprint, as it’s about the same weight, but unfortunately you can’t use cheaper paper in this and expect the same results.  You can’t see it in the photo, but the blue paint made the newsprint wrinkle.

Unlike most pieces, this was inspired by the novel I’m writing right now (Mulberry Wands).  In this novel, owls feature predominantly, so I’ve been thinking about them.   I started by painting the back of the main box blue, and I printed stars on it with a commercially purchased foam stamp set.  I also painted the inside of the roof of the box (though as you can see in the photo, I ended up not attaching it.)

For the main box, I painted two pictures of owls in watercolor on 140lb cold pressed paper.  The branches are from our tangerine tree, which has been having a few rough years and has plenty of dead wood to spare.  Once I put the branches in, I chose the owl picture which worked better.  Lucky for me, the original size of the painting was suitable, so I didn’t have to print out a copy, I was able to use the original.

Next, I covered the lower box with the aubergine metallic paper, and I painted the inside flat black.  Soon after that, I decided I wanted to put a glass sheet in front of the box, like a specimen display.  (For anyone trying this at home, use a real glass cutter, not an oblong piece of tungsten carbide, especially if you’re going to wrap it in copper foil afterward.)  I knew that if I painted it with black or silver, it would have a nice mirrored effect, so I kept with the night theme and painted the waxing and waning moon. I made the moons small so that they wouldn’t obscure whatever was in the box.

I knew I wanted to incorporate the feather somehow.  I found this feather in my chicken coop, and it seemed to suit.  I was going to drape it across the top, but then there was space below that needed something.  At this point I decided to put it along the bottom, and find something else later to put on the roof.

So what to put in the box?  I was working with a deliberately limited color scheme, so I wanted something white or blue.  Something dark wouldn’t show up.  Owls are killers, and they’re silent, so there’s a sense of coldness.  Bones are also cold and silent, and I liked the creepy-yet-scientific idea of a bone.  This is a real cat bone. I’m pretty sure it’s the pelvis.  My daughter found the cat skeleton in our bushes, and she said I could have one of the bones.  I put it in the box and wedged the glass in front to keep it in.

She also said I could have the bones from her owl pellet at school, but hers were kind of gross, and I didn’t feel like cleaning mice ribs because they break so easily.  Jane helped me out here too, in that she gave me the contents of an owl pellet that had been sanitized.  I used one of the mouse skulls for another project (The Trickster, an art doll that’s still on www.cagedfaeries.com), so I had one left.  I rubbed it with silver and blue mica pigments, and set it experimentally on the roof.  It was too small.

Last night I started a stained glass class, and the instructor had us practice cutting circles in plain and bubbled glass.  When I cut this circle out, I realized I had a good use for it.  I ground the edges to make them smoother (or at least not sharp enough to slice).  The bubbled glass works as a halo to draw attention to the mouse skull.

This piece is just under twelve inches tall, and six inches wide.  At its widest, it’s three and a half inches.

This is my favorite book, and I almost considered keeping it rather than giving it away.  I wanted to do a cover that was almost entirely cloth, because I like the soft tactile feel of it.  I collaged it using a sewing machine, as I did with the glass fish book (not posted, as I lost the photos.)  From that project I learned that sewing machines don’t like to sew through clumps of ribbon.  To get around this, I layered tissue paper over the top of the cloth and ribbon, and when I was done, I tore the tissue paper off.  They do make special paper that will dissolve in water, so you don’t have to tear it off, but I have too many art supplies as it is.

I had already drilled holes in the coins to make a coin belt, but I decided not to use them because the edges were slightly sharp and would cut through thread if they were shaken frequently.  I sewed them with sturdy thread, so I think they will do just fine unless the book is put in someone’s belt and shimmied.  I sewed the beads on to add a little more texture, and to hold down some of the loose material.

The end papers are a handmade paper from Tibet that I bought at an import store when I was in Seattle a couple years ago.

For this book cover I started by gessoing over cotton cloth.  Then I impressed in the wet gesso with some stamps. There’s a crysanthemum, a cherry branch, and a geisha, as well as something that looks like a stylized five pointed blossom.  When the gesso dried, I painted over it with greenish and gold metallic acrylic. I rubbed some of the paint off to emphasize the texture.

The fimo embellishments were ones I made several months ago.  I rolled out a thin slab of translucent fimo, then pressed stamps into it.  After that I cut wedges and a center circle by using an apple corer.  After they were baked, I painted them gold.  The effect was rather more subtle than I liked, so I emphasized them with the maple leaf paper. 

The paper is tough (expensive) multi-print washi that I bought in Japan. I used some more for the endpapers, and for the strip on the back cover.  The gold stamp on the spine was one that was issued while I was in Japan as part of their “International Letter-Writing Week”.  I wrote a lot of letters (hundreds and hundreds) in the two years I was there, so I came to be very familiar with every stamp in the 130 yen denomination.