Cutting it fine.....

I planned to make this calendar MONTHS ago. In the end I finally finished it on January 1st. Just in time, phew!

It is a pressie for my fab chappie Ian, I hope he likes it. He did nod and smile and make all the right noises, but it's hard to tell with boys :)

As it took forever and a day, I decided to get more mileage out of it by making some desk calendars too (see right at the bottom of this post, ink pad for scale) - so I got a load of 6"x6" colour copies done at Staples.

The original calendar is 12"x12"

The format of each page is the same - a background made from various paper ephemera primed with gesso and coloured with various acrlyic washes and drips of pearlescent acrylic inks. Month name stamped with toning pigment ink and clear embossed. Plus an iconic image to symbolise each month cut from textured card:




(drip drip drop, little April showers)

(here we go gathering nuts in May.....I was grasping at straws a little with this one :D)

(Strawberries at Wimbledon....)





(there's glitter on the fireworks but you can't really see in this pic)



Here is how the backgrounds were made:

1) Randomly tear and stick pages from an old book, and sheet music, to a large sheet of watercolour paper. (1 sheet makes headers for two months so you need 7 of them in total including the piece used for the front cover of the calendar). Fill in the gaps with rubber stamped images, using permanent black ink.



2. Once dry, use an old credit or store card to scrape gesso over the surface to whitewash and soften the papers.



3. Using washes of various acrylic paints, and undiluted pearlescent acrylic inks, colour each month's background paper in "month appropriate" colours.



And finally - the desktop version made from the colour photocopies mounted on black card (actually, I think I like it better smaller):



It was a lot of work, and I will probably never make another, but I am glad I stuck it out. I usually abandon biiiiiig projects like this about a quarter of the way in...

I couldn't really give Ian a calendar with only January-March in it though, could I? :D