This weekend I’ve made some good progress with the book. I also just ran out of glue, and so will be forced (possibly fortuitously) to explore some different techniques for a bit. I got the covers done before the Jones Tones well went dry, though.

Here are the black foam sheets with the dried designs drawn in glue. They measure roughly 6.5″ x 7.5″.

I spent today painting them and fiddling around with finding beads to match. Managed to succeed on all fronts.

I suspect this will be the cover:

And this will likely either be the back cover or the frontispiece, depending.

The next part of the project is to determine what will be written, where, and how. This part always requires a mental adjustment on my part, because when I’m thinking in images, I don’t often visualise words. I use them, of course, mainly as conceptual tools, but I rarely think of how they’ll look in an image.

I do have one additional rabbit in my hat now, though. We bought a new printer (and computer incidentally – the old one gasped, wheezed and was silent). Armed with my handy-dandy (but oh so cheap) Epson C-88, I can print on fabrics of all sorts. I did a test print of imagery the other day and it does a beautiful job. Light and colourfast, too. It’s nice to be free of BubbleJet Set (the chemical you soak fabric in to make it receptive to inkjet inks and to make the printout colour fast) – I won’t miss the fumes! Or the nuisance….

On to the text!