Workin' hard

I am creating my first ever fabric book for an art call put out by a gallery in CO. The submission deadline is Friday, the 20th and I'm crankin'. Why don't these ideas come to me just after I find out about an exhibit so I have time to work instead of right at the deadline?!

Since this is my first fabric book, I am learning a lot, documenting what I'm doing, what I'd do different, etc... Yesterday I worked from 5:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. with little break. My body is lashing out at me for it too. I will take the day off to spend Father's day with my step-dad but will be back in the studio tomorrow. With other things I have going on this week, I'll be lucky to get this finished. It's MUCH more detailed and time consuming than I'd anticipated. The thing that frustrates me about my work is that often, it looks so simple yet I spent hours and hours on it. I've easily had some layouts for these pages that have taken me an hour just to design the composition and layout of fabric bits for a single page... and they aren't big! But I'm trying to achieve the right balance in composition with elements as well as color and value. Then, all the little pieces have to be adhered to the fabric page, sewn, and then the image added.
The images are transparency transfers onto watercolor paper of my cactus blossom photographs. They are then ages with walnut ink. Here's a preview:
I completed 10 page faces yesterday with 6 left to go... then binding the book which will be done using my original binding idea so the pages will be added individually. By the way, I did submit a proposal to write an article about this binding method but was turned down. I'm thinking of creating a class to teach it and also creating a pdf file to sell the instructions. I dunno...

Here's a tip for those of you wanting to try transfers from a transparency printed on an inkjet printer to watercolor paper. I experimented and found that the images turned out better on cold press paper instead of hot press, which wasn't what I'd expected. I used fluid matte medium to transfer the images and on the hot press, because it is smooth, the images showed streaks. This didn't happen on the cold press paper. See what I mean?
These transfers are on hot press paper. You can see all the lines where I was burnishing the images down.
These were on cold press paper. This was the look I was going for.

Well, gotta' go get ready for church! The shower is calling...