My Marjie Kemper accordion book

This weekend is kicking off the new initiative!  I can't call it a New Year's resolution because were almost to April.  What I will say is that my goal now is to complete the works that I've begun. Sometimes when you're working in collage it's hard to tell when a piece of art is done. In my case, determining when a project is done has more to do with noting whether there are any blank pages left. That's the criteria I'm going to work with now. To quote one of my favorite teachers (Dina) perfect is the enemy of done and I would much rather have all these wonderful projects completed so I can leave them around the house and savor them. 

A couple years ago my friends and I took a class with an artist Marjie Kemper and we started an accordion book each page was an ATC sized artwork. This means essentially the size of a playing card. I completed half of my pages in the book.  There is something so utterly appealing about small works of art collected in this book. I find myself bringing the book out and paging through it and wanting to touch every page. I'm not sure why that is, but I do believe it's good to be forced to work in on a small scale sometimes.  I guess because you have to get to the heart of it. It also helps that you're able to complete it much faster. 

So I set out to finish the book and in one evening I did just that. Importantly I had a really fun time pulling out different pieces of work that I had started trying to find the perfect embellishment it just inspired me and that's the whole point. 

So here are the pages. To see the first part of the book, travel back to May of 2014. 

Okay, this is a playing card. It's a Pokemon card that my nephew gave me and I love that it's a bee character.  So I worked with him and decked it out a bit.  I love the little description of the character, I had to highlight that.

This was a fun card to make.  I had a piece of paper that I had stenciled and decided to cover it in resin.  One day I had extra resin from a project so I painted it all over the paper.  It changes the paper and makes it translucent and shiny.  It's trans-formative. I felt that it was a special card so I created a few relics and put them in glassine envelopes. I sewed them to the page with waxed linen and labeled it of course.  Maybe I have to make the remaining 36 relics - someday.

I am a real fan of Frida Kahlo.  I had this great background stamps (anyone remember Judikins?) and there were all these people, so democratic. I though of her.  So I stamped her image and had to darken it to really highlight her. Then I wanted to see her face so I painted white over the background in her face.  It appears like I drew it, but it's one of my large cube stamps. I found these jewel like embellishments.  I'm not sure what they are called, but they have spiked points on the back.  Had to use a mouse pad and carefully push them through the paper and flatten them on the back. Makes me think I should do a whole journal just on Frida.

This background was made in the Marjie class and I decided to embellish with some clear buttons I decorated recently.  I stamped on the buttons and in some cases I used tissue, stamped on the tissue and then glued the button to the tissue.  

Finally, the last page.  I had used a combo stencil and mask on this one.  We used the mask first, leaving the white and coloring the yellow around the mask.  Then used the counterpart stencil and stamped/stenciled the lettering inside the area where the mask had been.  I edged the figure of a woman with Dina's Penny paint using her amazing fine point tip. I used this paper from Italy that has tiny postcard images and attached them with a brad.  I have to make everything interactive. It's just what I love to do.

Night, night everyone!  Enjoy!