Making book, part deux
Jul. 29th, 2017 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
offcntr Now that Clever Girl is bisque-fired, it's time to consider surface treatment. The dino herself is simple, if messy: Wax over the colored porcelain eyes, teeth and tongue. Iron oxide wash, brushed on and sponged off again to leave traces in the creases and crevices. (Leaving me red-handed for the next several days, worse than cooking beets.) Maybe some white underglaze on the belly, white stripes across the spine.
The book needs content, though. I impressed the title into the spine--The Big Book of Dinosaurs--but intentionally left the pages blank. Since my head-canon is that my velociraptor thinks it's a cookbook, I need her to be perusing the herbivores. These two are sufficiently close, alphabetically. Also fun to draw. Here's the process.
Beginning with the blank page, first define the border of the illustration, then draw the dinosaur. Letter in the heading, then use a grey wash to greek-type the body copy.
Turn the page and repeat. Next, I brushed wax resist over the edges of the page block, then brushed a chrome oxide wash onto the cover, sponging back a bit, which leaves extra color in the canvas texture, and especially in the rubber-stamped title in the spine. The result looks astonishingly like the green, cloth-bound books of my grade-school library.
Final results. Well, semi-final; the firing will probably tone down and darken the colors considerably. We'll just have to wait and see.
The book needs content, though. I impressed the title into the spine--The Big Book of Dinosaurs--but intentionally left the pages blank. Since my head-canon is that my velociraptor thinks it's a cookbook, I need her to be perusing the herbivores. These two are sufficiently close, alphabetically. Also fun to draw. Here's the process.
Beginning with the blank page, first define the border of the illustration, then draw the dinosaur. Letter in the heading, then use a grey wash to greek-type the body copy.
Turn the page and repeat. Next, I brushed wax resist over the edges of the page block, then brushed a chrome oxide wash onto the cover, sponging back a bit, which leaves extra color in the canvas texture, and especially in the rubber-stamped title in the spine. The result looks astonishingly like the green, cloth-bound books of my grade-school library.
Final results. Well, semi-final; the firing will probably tone down and darken the colors considerably. We'll just have to wait and see.