Fun and The Giveaway

First the Fun part.  I recently started watching Carolyn Dube's awesome Gelli Plate tutorials on her blog, and I had a cool idea.  When you use the plate, you want to clean off the brayer on a plain piece of paper before you load another color.  Likewise, you want to offprint paint that's been picked up with rubber stamps, stencils, etc.  Carolyn does all that offprinting in a sketchbook, essentially creating backgrounds for future art journaling and collaging.

So, yesterday I was tearing down big sheets of paper to print on, and while I was at it, I made myself this 9x12 inch hand bound sketchbook to use alongside whatever else it is I'm printing.

The book cover is an old watercolor piece I did over 20 years ago.  Because there was white area around the painting, I stitched fabric scraps (some of which were outtakes of a project you'll see next week) around all the edges of the paper.  There are four signatures, a total of 80 pages, and it was bound with a 7-hole pamphlet stitch.

Okay, now the Giveaway part ~ next week is my Fifth Blogoversary, hard to believe.  I'll be doing a drawing on January 15 for TWO winners of this cool set of major arcana tarot cards.

You may remember that in 2011 and 2012 I was involved in a local Humboldt County project with 21 other artists, creating individual major arcana cards for a tarot deck.  We each selected one card during a ritual get-together -- my card is The Devil, it's on the bottom of the photo in the front.

We had several months to create the artwork, then the work was all photographed and printed as a deck of cards.  Mine is the only collage in the bunch, the rest are all paintings.  We had a show of the original artwork in Eureka last summer.

Each artist was given a few copies of the deck to do with as they pleased.  So I'm giving away two of my decks to my blog readers.

If you're a fan of the tarot and would like to have this deck, leave a comment on this post or any subsequent post before January 15.  If you're a collector of tarot decks, as many are, don't miss this opportunity.  All you have to do is tell me that you want to be included in the drawing.