Cover art

I am on a roll folks. I am continuing to create art on a regular basis. I am doing so much that I decided to only post things that get finished.

Last night I finished a cover to one of my books. I usually do the covers near the end of a book because other wise I am smashing the embellishments and when I am working on the inside the art on the cover makes it hard to get a good impression and such.

The technique that I did on this cover is a faux leather technique. I love it because it uses recycled grocery sacks. Perfect for an earth day project.

Ingredients

1. Brown Grocery Sacks torn into random pieces
2. soft gel medium
3. glue brush (a paint brush dedicated to glue)
4. Substrate in this case my book cover

Steps

1. Glue the pieces of grocery sack down on the substrate.
2. Cover with gel medium. Let dry

Easy peasy huh and it makes a great background. I have a page I will show later when it is finished that I did the same thing. I used an old nylon paint brush I got at an estate sale and as I was spreading the glue bits of the bristles were coming off so my book has these interesting black spots that I had not planned for at all.

Next I stamped the white swirls using white gesso. Let that dry. Then stenciled using sequence waste the purple and yellow dots.

To the spine I add some ribbon flowers along the spine. These are different then the technique I talked about the other day. I will show you how to make these later when I do some step by step pictures. These particular flowers I made last year for Artfest as trades and forgot to trade them.

Final step was to stamp something on the front. Coming up with titles for my altered books is very random. What ever word pops in my head I use. In this case, April the month it was worked on and it fit perfectly.

Circus page

This page has been worked on different times in the last year or so. It really has gone in spurts. The spread was gessoed first, as are most of my pages. Then the circus tissue paper from the dollar store was added. I thought it was really to bright for anything I would do so I dry brushed titanium buff over it to push it to the background and fade it out. So then it set for a while.

Then one day I was messing around with creating ribbon flowers and realized the orange polka dotted ribbon went well on this page but I did not have any focal image so the page sat with possible embellishments but no focal image.

In September, my friend go married and we made her wedding programs with orange vellum. Well the orange vellum that was not perfect became mine. As I thought about it I thought it went really well with this page.

I stamped the face, buildings and quote (all from Zettilogy) and placed them on the page. I added the ribbon flowers and like the page but it did not seem finished.

On Monday, I had a box of trim out next to me and the braided trim was right on top the perfect color and the perfect size to finish off the page.

I am not sure where I learned to do the ribbon flowers, but I know I was influenced by Sister Diane who taught me how to make flower embellishments out of buttons and trim so I am going to give her credit.

Directions for the ribbon flowers.

Ingredients:

1. Ribbon about 6 inches but really this depends on how full you want your flower. The ribbon has to be wide enough that you can run a stitch along it. I used 1 inch wide ribbon.
2. Scissors
3. Thread any color
4. Needle
5. Button
6. Embroidery thread or fake flower stamens.
7. Fabric glue or heavy duty industrial glue like E-6000

Steps:

1. Cut ribbon to desired length. Run a running stitch along the edge. This edge will be hidden by the button so don't worry about thread color. Cut off thread. Leave at least 3 inches of thread at both ends of the ribbon.

2. Gently pull the thread so the ribbon bunches up. Tie the to ends together tightly.

3. Thread embroidery thread through button and tie off like flower stamens or use fake stamens. Glue button on top.

This ribbon make great hair embellishments as well.

I know another each ribbon flower that I will share later.