The "Black and White with a Touch of Red" Book

I've been completely taken with making these small books for the last week or two.
I am learning so many things about what I can get away with  elements of design and construction while doing this.
I think that everyone should work on the same type of project for a length of time to fully flesh out your ideas and allow the project to have its way with you.

If you're like me, the more I screw things up, I mean the more "great ideas" I have, the more opportunites for fixing those "great ideas" there are.
Some of my best work is the result of a really "great idea"...!
The moral of that story is to do enough work that you mess up a lot.
This is the only way to grow in creating artwork - no matter what the medium is.

You MUST get in the studio and play!

This is the book that is patiently wating for its pages.
I'm painting a group of them just for this little book.

I've used one of my pen and ink drawings to create the cover.
A neighbor gave me some leather scraps that he had and I'm using one of them as the cover base.
I'll use this book as a sample in one of my upcoming book making classes.

Don't you love the glass bead/button that a friend of mine gave me?
It's the perfect embellishment for the poppy drawing on the cover -
 it repeats the circular shape and the lines on the inside of a couple of them.

You just have to keep looking through your stash of things (and other folks stash!) until you find the "perfect thing" that will elevate your artwork. You don't want to rush through it , adding embellishments or marks that distract from it instead of adding to it.
Learn to give your work time to evolve - it may take a while but it's really worth.