Back To The Drawing Board

I considered throwing in the towel. Really. Maybe I was getting too old for this kind of stuff. But then a quick online trip to my old friend, John Neal Bookseller revealed that somebody else was selling their size online and it was pretty much guaranteed to work. So I bought it, tried it out tonight, and although it was a bit of a rush job, it seems to be working! Back in business. I can't believe how LONG this takes.... It's hard to tell from the photos, but it is OH SO NICE and shiny (it is 23 karat gold, after all).

Ok, so after I redrew MOST of it, I got worried that my progress would get smudged or messed up, and well, I was ansty to have some REAL progress. So I decided to start inking. My confidence in my design skills was (foolishly) enough that I thought by the time I got to the part I hadn't re-drawn, I could just wing it in ink and save myself some time. Not so much. Second problem: My glorious ink, Sennelier Encre de Chine a la Pagode, did not weather the double cross-country trips well. Rather than wait for a few weeks to order some more, I went out and bought the only ink I could find: crummy Speedball Calligrapher's Ink. I figured it would be ok since it's what I used to use when I first started doing illuminations in the first place. But it looks awful next to the nice, dark shiny lettering. Darn. Third problem: in an effort to console myself about my stupid purchase, I decided to start playing around with the guilding aspect. Which brings us to yet another problem: how ...

So, I found this old piece I had started back in, oh, say, around 2002 or so. It's one stanza from a poem by Padraig O Maille about being exiled and missing home. I had planned it out, done all the lettering, and sketched out most of the border and decorations. Then I stopped. My memory is such that I can't remember why I stopped (my guess is school?) or why I was doing it in the first place (fun, probably). But as I looked at it, I remembered what fun I used to have doing these insanely complicated illuminations. So, as a challenge to myself, I decided to finish it. Easier said than done. I can't even remember what I had in mind for some of the designs (they were apparently ones I made up all by myself), and my plans were nothing more than a rough sketch. No help there. I did manage to find some parts of the illumination in various books of mine, so using those as a guide I began filling in the blanks. I had NO IDEA how hard that would be. Let's say my hands were not h...

It's fun with pastels night...pay no attention to the fact that my sense of perspective is lacking. I decided to do a landscape of La Encantada Mall in Tucson, Az, in the style of Mary Blair. For those of you who don't know her, she's responsible for the look of films like Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland (disney), and the ride "It's a Small World".