New Year, New Book

Although the book is not yet finished, I thought I'd include it here as a work in progress to indicate that I actually have been working on clay, in spite of my hiatus from posting for over a month!  I will be doing a demo this Saturday and this is what I am going to be illustrating.  I have all the elements of the book ready, but had this picture taken before the covers were put in the oven, so this doesn't show the complete details. 

A while back, I had purchased Tina Holden's Shimmer and Batik tutorial, and finally had all the supplies (I got a ton of foiling stuff for Christmas) and needed to try everything out.  I did change the methods slightly...I added more texture to the impression as I needed a way of adhering the star to the background and I may have used more removal of the ink than was intended.  Anyway, it looks pretty and the colors of the background pretty closely match the colors in the Batik/shimmer element.  Instead of finishing it in the way recommended in the tutorial, I am going to add a coat of Future to preserve the inks, foil and pearl elements just to the cutout part. Just for the sake of clarity during the demo I will not be doing the Shimmer Batik technique.  I will be walking  folksthrough how to make basic covers for a book, how to prepare the signatures and demo the Coptic binding technique, the part of the book making which requires the most practice for 'unsewers' like moi.

  The interior is a Skinner Blend and when the whole thing comes together I will be adding watercolor pages inside and some beads to the binding, as I have done with most of my books.  I hope it turns out.