Ellen's Book

I love working with gel pens. When they were popular a few years ago, I bought hundreds of them, but unfortunately they're not as easy to find now. Now everything claims to be a gel pen, but I specifically look for opaque colors for using on black, and ones that keep their metallic lustre well, and also colored metallics that don't just soak into the paper and look like dull silver when you actually use them.

Anyway, I found a small supply of them at some stationary store - the packages are in Japanese - so I happily put them to work in Ellen's book.

Click any image to see larger versions at Flickr.

First finishing the collaboration with Mike:





Some horses that remind me of the Wizard of Oz for some reason. This didn't go really as planned, but eh, nothing does...



On this piece, I had a total nerd-out idea that I was going to do some Gallifreyan-inspired design and I got out my grandfather's old compass drawing set, but that too didn't go as planned, so I went over it with a few layers of stuff until I was happy with it. I didn't really do too much on the right side to start a collaboration - I just left the spread pretty open and sent a few tendrils across so Michelle can do whatever she wants. She can cross over, go right on top of mine, or stay on the right or whatever. I just kept going until I felt pretty done and didn't push it.