Asian Art Journal Pages

One of my favorite collaborative journal projects is the one with the asian theme.  Everyone went all out in this group, creating their own books, and using some lovely and interesting bindings.  Last week I received journals made by my two local friends, Pat and Teri, and spent this week working on them.  They are both on the small side, easily held in one hand, and the pages done before me are, as usual, a combination of elegant, whimsical, classical and eclectic styles.  Pat receives journals from me, so when I hand these two to her next week, she will be seeing her journal for the first time in nearly a year.  And when Pat finishes Teri's book, that one will be going home as well.  My own book came home a couple of weeks ago, and that was a thrill.

Here are my pages for Teri's book.

I did the floral watercolor on the second page, and then selected some stamps that I thought complemented it for the facing page.  They were embossed with black powder.  The backgrounds for both pages were just me playing with sprays, stencils, pages of Japanese text, gesso, and probably a dozen other things I can't recall.  I was just grabbing whatever was on my table.  Many of us have added a haiku to our pages.

Pat's pages are quite a bit different, very shiny and bright.  I made a lot of use of my joss paper, which is where all the gold comes from.

The image of the woman is kind of a hybrid.  It started out as a xyrene transfer, which I heard about on the asian group message board.  Taking care to work in a well ventilated room, you lay a toner copy face down onto your surface and then rub the back with a xyrene filled blender pen (the kind used for blending alcohol based markers like Copics or Prismacolors).  As it turned out, I had one (never used) in my stash. 

Because I was trying to apply the image to a very textured surface, only parts of it actually transfered well.  Hence the word hybrid.  I used a Sharpie to fill in some of the missing lines.

There is also a bit of stamping, and I added the beaded edge as well.

I know there are several books in this group that I have not yet worked on, so I have something to look forward to.  Love these journals!