This page took more time that I thought it would.
To begin with, the page started with just the strips glued around the edge. I hadn‘t even decided what I wanted to put on the page.
I knew I wanted to do a hippy, flower child type doll somewhere in this journal. Then I remember that I had templates for a B.E.D. (Big Eyed Doll) and I thought that would work, so I cut out the parts for the doll‘s body.
Then I had designed her clothes and cut them out, so I would know what the basic color scheme for the page would be. Once I had the color scheme, I could color in the white areas of the black and white designs.
With that finished, I had to come up with a way to make the big blue area less prominent. Some paint and stencils helped a lot.
When it was time to glue everything to the page, I decided to use Liquitex clear gesso to stick it all down. I was thinking the gesso would add enough texture to it that I could use colored pencils to enhance the page. That turned out to be a BIG mistake. First of all, it didn‘t work well as a “glue”, with the doll popping back off the page because of the warping from the moisture. In addition, after it all dried, I realized it now had way too much texture!
So I ended up recoating everything with PVA glue to smooth it out. But that only partially helped. I still had a great deal of difficulty drawing over the parts of the doll and adding depth with shadowing to the doll and the lettering.
I‘ve put that bottle of gesso back in the cupboard so I don‘t grab it as easily again in the future!
The words on the page are:
Flower Child
She was a child of the 60s and 70s, a cotillion debutante and the member of a commune. She became an actress, a singer, and played her guitar at the coffee house near the university. She didn‘t care what anyone thought because she was her own person.
Tandika*