Vellum Grade

For this minibook, any relief print that I added has been printed on vellum.  As you can see in the print below, the skeleton is on the smokey-almost transparent vellum, then sitting on top of a black anchor page.  This particular vellum is a little thick for this application, so the anchor papers, especially if they are a detailed print, are somewhat obscured.

The jar below is printed on vellum with white ink, then the spider is hand drawn on the reverse side from the printing.  On the same side as the relief print, I added glass reflection lines to make the jar look more 3-dimensional. 

In the first jar example, the vellum is resting on top of a black piece of anchor paper.  When I flipped the image over and added the glass "volume" lines, I placed the vellum on a page containing insect images....in retrospect, this probably represents spider torture, but that was not the original intent.  Although it looks like these are two different images, it is actually the same image above and below; when it was flipped, the drawing of the spider is on the top surface, toward the viewer.  If this vellum was just a little more transparent, I think the overall image would be stronger and more engaging!

Below, the paper has also been flipped, but the technique for creating the image does not include a relief print.  On one side of the vellum, I used a white pastel pencil to draw in the web lines, then flipped the velum over and stamped the spider.  It would have been wise to stamp first, then flip and draw because of the fragile nature of the pastel pencil.  I was pleased that the vellum "tooth" was not nearly as smooth as I thought, so it really grabbed the pastel and didn't tolerate much material drift - got lucky!

When attaching the vellum to the book page, I wanted to be sure the spider stamp was dry, dry, dry and the pastel web was face down.  I am disappointed that the web almost completely disappears on top of this patterned paper, but I am leaving it in the book - another gook experiment! 

Note to self"  keep an eye out for more transparent vellum!