Michelle's book done (round 2)

First off, I sort of collaborated with Mike & Mary on this page. It was nearly blank, and right next to theirs, so I tried to keep with the theme.

I haven't read the book, but I love the graphic design on the cover of Gail Carriger's Souless. The typography's reminiscent of Jamie Reid's work for the Sex Pistols, but it looks refreshed on Carriger's series of steampunk vampire novels. Anyway, I've had it stuck in my head since I saw it, and incorporated it here. All the pieces collaged together here are inkjet printed: The background starry nebula was printed on a slide-off water transfer. The edges aren't as perfect as I'd like, and I didn't think about the fact that Mike's ink might not have been waterproof, but it didn't bleed too much. You can still see his drawing clearly through the transfer in real life. The wording was printed on bumper sticker stock, and the hummingbird thing on glossy photo paper. Not shown here is that I intended for the wings to curl up a bit, and so I backed the hummingbird with really cool purple printed paper.

A pair of horses on facing pages:

I worked on these while watching The Tudors on Netflix, thus the rose in the first one. Not actually a Tudor rose, but inspired by it.


And lastly, the aforementioned rhinestone pages. I'd been thinking that I wanted to cover a page in rhinestones just for the fun of it since the beginning of the exchange. It's over-the-top, but it's fun to run your hand over the pages full of stones, and it makes for a nice surprise because of the added dimensionality. Oh, and I have a gigantic box of rhinestones salvaged when a company I used to work for closed down. I held off using the stones until the end of the exchange because I figured it'd hard to draw on the reverse.

When it came time to do the actual pages, I decided to add some artwork to them by using the water decals to transfer my digital drawings into the book, so the owl & octopus don't have anything to do with each other, I just tried to reverse the color scheme from one page to the next.

This is almost the same owl I did in Willie's book, but after I worked on the drawing a bit more in the computer and made some additions and changes.