16 October 2008

Making progress on magic grimoire

Tonight I made good progress on my grimoire that I'm doing for this month's challenge with A. I decided to go with the idea mentioned in a previous blog entry about illustrating the seven black arts banned in the Renaissance. That means I need to produce seven illustrations, then seven panels for the opposite side, and figure out how to attach the seven pieces of bookboard together.

So far I've completed the panels for hydromancy, aeromancy, and geomancy. My favorite so far is geomancy (I will put up pictures in a later post when the whole thing is complete), which funnily enough was the first one I did. I hope it's not all downhill from there!

What I did tonight were more new things for me. I couldn't find a drawing of any flames or fire that I liked, so I had to draw it by hand myself--horrors! Never done that before, but I prefer my rendition to anything else I've seen. I used white transfer paper, which I'd never used before, and wow! the possibilities THAT opens up are huge. Anyway, I ended up cutting a reverse mask (I guess that's what it's called) so that I could pretend it was a stencil. I used it to apply copper embossing paste from Dreamweavers to cardstock, and once it dries I will apply glue from the Palette gluepad, followed by variegated red leafing. I think it's going to look great! When it's complete, I'll cut it out and plan to mount it on a background sheet of either glitter black, black bumps, or black velvet. Don't think I can decide until the leafing has been applied and I see how that looks.

I also started work on the panel for nigromancy, for which I'm using the Tim Holtz Stampers Anonymous circles stamp. I made about five different versions using different inks and embossing powders, then cut out bits of one and bits of another to layer over a base image. I'd like to figure out how to attach some of them so that the circles will actually spin around--maybe just a straight pin? It looks good, though, at least tonight. Hopefully in the morning I'll still be as pleased!