Gardenia

This spread has so many components, I can barely remember how it came about. To begin with, I had painted both pages entirely with blue and beige paint. You can imagine that wasn't very exciting. The bright yellow came about when I was stirring some of my paints. I try to do this every few months with the expensive bottles to see if I need to add water (I don't bother with the cheap craft acrylics.) This yellow was either Ziller Ink or Plaka casein emulsion paint. Anyway, I just rolled the stir stick across the right page to use up the bit of paint that still clung to it. That livened things up somewhat and gave me the idea to make a yellow-green border. I cut curved pieces of acetate film as masks to protect the blue paint and brushed on yellow paint around the edges, followed by some green which was partially wiped off to reveal parts of the yellow. Next, I drew a narrow border on top of the blue shape using a white charcoal pencil. This was outlined with a black Prismacolor pencil, and finally decorations were added with a black Pitt F pen. The final touch was the photo of a beautiful gardenia...my favorite flower. I love how the colors in it complement those already on the page.

One of my favorite tricks when gluing an illustration to a page, is to adhere it so parts of it hang off the page, and then trim these off after it's dry. I think the page looks more professionally designed this way, than when I just plop something in the middle.