postcard and flu

I have been laid low with the flu for the last week so have felt OK about spending hours on the computer playing lots of games of lexulous and eucre. I did update my webpage for 2009, it's only half way through the year, maybe I should have made allowance for 2010 while I was at it. It probably needs a complete overhaul but I'm not sure I've got that much energy. Yesterday I felt like death warmed up so just sat around watching videos but the day before I finished off a couple of books and made my postcard for the Yabbers exchange. The theme this time was 'Icons' and there had to be some sort of construction. I have done a few things with icons in the past so already had images on my computer and I had the moulds for the decorative framing that I'd carved in plaster. It was just a matter of casting four copies of the frame then joining them together with some strips of calico and painting them. I used black gesso for the base then rubbed over some metallic oilstick and gold acrylic. I then painted everything with shellac and rubbed again with the gold since the shellac dissolved the oilstick. Now to test the mail and see if it gets to its destination.



The books I made were concertinas for the exhibition at Artisan Books called Between the Lines. I haven't decided yet which one to submit, the first one has the text watermarked between the strings and both pieces of paper had the text watermarked, they don't quite match up but the text is still visible, I am pleased that the text is quite subtle, says something about reading between the lines!


For the second book in the series I lightly coloured some pulp so that there would be a slight contrast, making the text less of a watermark, more a stencil.

The cream paper in the two books is cotton sheeting beaten in Papermakers of Victoria's lab Valley beater for three hours, the blue is archival mount board processed in an old non automatic washing machine and with a blender dyed with cartesol dyes.